One of the things that’s striking here is the disparity between the cost of food at restaurants and at grocery stores. Last week, I moved to the workers’ paradise of Denmark, where I will man the Audit Aalborg bureau for a year while my wife is here on a Fulbright. If labor costs doubled suddenly, restaurant owners would have to raise prices significantly in order to stay in business. No, expert opinion is not mixed on whether doubling minimum wages would “affect consumer wallets,” even if the LAT found one academic to sort of say so. “There are so many other factors at work.” “Many people have assumed that if you increase the minimum wage by X percent, the meal costs will increase by the same percent, and that’s simply not true,” she said. Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, said it’s unclear whether a minimum wage bump would have enough of a ripple effect to affect consumer wallets. More than doubling that level would be an unprecedented leap.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Writing about the burgeoning protests by low-wage workers for a $15 an hour wage, the paper writes this: That raises the question: If they’re successful, will burger prices soar?Įxpert opinion is mixed. Even the bad-math types we’ve seen in the last few weeks have always assumed some price increases.īut the LAT runs with this dumb-question headline: Would a higher minimum wage mean pricier burgers?
The Los Angeles Times drops into the debate over whether or how much prices would have to rise at fast-food restaurants for their employees to get $15 an hour.Īctually, this is the first time I’ve seen the question of whether prices would rise treated seriously.
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