Chicago politicians want to make our minimum wage 10 dollars an hour!

[Max King of the Wild]

Aielyn said:

Max King of the Wild said:

Only 3 possible outcomes. Cut hours (which defeats this increase) increase prices (which defeats this increase) or eat costs.... What do you think businesses will do? I can tell you right now both Target and Little Caesars will decrease hours and Little Caesars will most likely increase prices.

These three possible outcomes only apply if you ONLY consider the direct impacts. As I've already pointed out, there are heaps of different feedback mechanisms in the market. The net impact is NOT obvious. It isn't even remotely estimable by such crude and amateur reasoning.

"whatever group is more inelastic shall incur the costs. Incentives will drive the decisions. Yada yada economy economy blah blah blah. There is a certain wage people will work for at jobs and maybe Chicago is trying to create a incentive for people to work at McDonalds. People might be saying "I'm not working there for 8.50" and they might change their tone at 10 dollars... but with the state of the economy that dollar amount has lowered and Mcdonalds doesn't need those people who wont work for less because its easy to find people who will. If min wage acts like tax blah blah blah... Most likely business will cut hours or increase prices" - economist

Like those amateur reasonings?

PS - A 4 dollar jump in 5 years is quite a difference. And all the previous wage increases have done is A. decrease hours (I was a store manage at little caesars when they increased it a dollar to 7.25 and Little Caesars immediate response was to limit hours and pay increases). or B. increase prices. Little Caesars sold their pizza at 5 dollars when I left in 2008 (when min wage was 7.25). Now it's been 6.50 for a while and interesting enough minimum wage was 8.50 in 2009.

In fact, Little Caesars tried to pass cost on to the consumer by increase crazy bread and sauce price the very first wage increase I witnessed. It was like 1.50 (1 dollar for bread 50 cents for sauce) for both and they increased it to 2.00(dollar for each). I forgot about that. All that did was make bread sales steady while sauce sales decline... How do I know this? Because we used year old books to calculate stuff that sales figures. We were suppose to use same week as the year before sales and increase it by 10% for our estimated week sales for scheduling and ordering (with taking trends into consideration and changing with managers discretion).