Economy
Related: About this forumThe minimum wage and the Danish Big Mac
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.
But the LAT runs with this dumb-question headline: Would a higher minimum wage mean pricier burgers?
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. If labor costs doubled suddenly, restaurant owners would have to raise prices significantly in order to stay in business. Its just math.
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. One of the things thats striking here is the disparity between the cost of food at restaurants and at grocery stores. The minimum wage in Denmark (ADDING: I should say that this is an effective minimum wage negotiated with unions, not a legal one) is roughly $20 an hour (though teenagers can earn somewhat less). Not coincidentally, labor-intensive restaurants have very high prices, while less-labor-intensive grocery store prices are much less shocking.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_minimum_wage_and_the_danis.php
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)a tiny, fairly homogenous country with a culture quite unlike ours.
I heard women actually leave their babies in carriages outside on the sidewalk when they go inside to shop or eat! How horrible and irresponsible-- here we would often arrest a woman who would dare do that. At the very least fill Facebook with images shaming her.
Politicalboi
(15,189 posts)My father remembered it, and there are old movies that show it too. I know it's the movies, but people did leave their babies outside in the carriage. It was normal back in the 20's and 30's.
mbperrin
(7,672 posts)by 200%?
I can live with that.
Truth is, people work better with higher morale when the money they earn gets them the things they want. It's called the income effect, and it's a totally standard Econ 101 concept.
Business most assuredly cannot just raise their prices at will, regardless of what their costs are. If they could, there would be no reason to keep costs down at all, just pass it on.
So would much higher minimum wages put some awful, low-price, greasy slop-houses of business? Very likely and thank God.
Would more people be able to afford to eat at much nicer places, even though more expensive, eating better ingredients and more fresh stuff? Yep.
OnlinePoker
(5,725 posts)Total, all-in cost including labor for a Big Mac was 28 cents. We were selling them for $1.25. The restaurant owner raked in the rest. I can't see that it would have changed that much.