Again - I genuinely believe hyper-local minimum wage hikes are especially stressful to the service industry. But articles like this make me almost more skeptical of that belief, because if this is the best they can do to make the case.....
Turns out he wasn't paying his taxes, or employees at times... ;)
Granted plenty of local business guys who certainly can have those opinions and they pay their taxes.
It's a fine line. My personal opinion is that minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage, but more for entry level, part time jobs for teenagers etc. If we raise the minimum wage to a level that provides a living wage (assuming 40 hour work week), then it becomes complicated since a lot of jobs are part time. To earn a living wage, someone would have to have multiple jobs, which generally sucks if you work in the food industry. It's a complicated problem, with lots of legacy baggage and viewpoints. Providing a living wage sounds great, but I think there's lots of issues when you're dealing with transient employees who don't want to work full time, don't have many skills, etc.
In the ideal pro-minimum-wage world, prices go up slightly but the impact on those who get the minimum wage bump is bigger than the impact on those people from price changes OR the impact on other people for those price changes.
That's the tradeoff pro-min-wage people would expect and want so if that's happening, no news there.
The tradeoff they would not want would be massive hours cuts, businesses going out of business (although some would want that - not me!), or this turning into an excuse for the businesses to cut costs and/or automate. We would need data of some kind to understand if that's happening.
That still requires interpretation.
Someone does X, is it because of Y or Z? Or something else?
A local business group supported some transit options in my area. I thought that was nice until I realized that they only supported politicians who wanted to cut state spending across the board. So of course no transit project...
After ten years of lobbying they finally got their transit projects.... from the opposite party. You would think they learned something but they haven't changed.
I'm really skeptical about "what local business guy thinks" type information and if they even really know what is in their best interest all the time.