The problem with this idea is that, beneath some wage floor, workers lose money by working, and would be better off growing food somewhere. The minimum wage is often below this floor, actually - people working minimum wage are often overall paying to work.

Growing food where? Someone owns all the productive farmland and they aren't giving it away. But people who are willing to work hard and get dirty can certainly find jobs in agriculture.

Maybe growing food is a bad example, especially since you may be homeless, though if you do own a house, you can do subsistence farming in almlst any soil, raise a few chicken etc.

A better example could be that rather than working below minimum age in NYC you would be better off moving to a rural area and working there.

Minimum wage limits is one of the best tools we have to act as a safety net. What would you replace it with 1 dollar an hour workers with a bigger food stamp budget?

If you can't afford to pay someone the minimum prices you can't afford your business. A minimum wage creates a floor. Allowing low wages means pushing the burden to everyone else not that business.. raise your prices or move to a lower cost country.

> Minimum wage limits is one of the best tools we have to act as a safety net

Minimum wage isn't a safety net at all. Minimum wage is a mitigation of the problem of low bargaining power of unskilled labor; it basically raises but narrows the tightrope above the safety net.

> If you can't afford to pay someone the minimum prices you can't afford your business. A minimum wage creates a floor.

Yes, it creates a floor for the value of labor you must be able to provide before you can be sustainably employed. (It also, simultaneously, sets a floor for what businesses will offer for labor even in conditions of labor oversupply; set at the right level, this makes it a net win even given the safety net problems it can exacerbate, but it is not the same as and does not remove the need for a safety net.)

> Allowing low wages means pushing the burden to everyone else not that business.

Only for the employees in fields affected by labor oversupply that would be employed in any case, and which are employed at lower wages.

Conversely, it also means lifting some of the burden off everyone else for the people who would not be employed with a minimum wage but who are employed without one.

> raise your prices or move to a lower cost country.

Unless you take the workers with you, “move to a lower cost country” means more people unemployed that are fully reliant on social support in the country that squeezed you out. Which is why minimum wage isn't a safety net.

Our local pizza places have raised prices dramatically in the last 6 months (16” pizza went from ~$10 to ~$15).

Based on observation during the far fewer times I visit them, they appear dramatically less busy than they used to be. It’s not clear that “just raise your prices and pay workers more” is going to work out for them.

Covid has shifted demand. Covid in some areas means limited seating and increased prep costs. Pizza is more popular in the winter. 10 to 15 sounds like a Covid related increase. This is the summer of the gauge where everyone is making back the profits they lost.

If think it's because minimum wage workers are making $50.00 more a week then this would only apply if the shop was selling less than 10 pizzas a day and had about 10 employees which sounds overstaffed and in an area with no demand.

A pizza shop with 1 - 3 employees working making 80 pizzas a day would only need to raise prices by pennies.

Is this a joke comment? I'm starting to lose the ability to see sarcasm I think. Why would you have expected them to have been busy in the last six months?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment, but why does the expectation of growth in a pizza parlor come across as absurd? Dominoes had 13-14% Q1 same store sales growth over 2020 numbers.

https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre comment: you said it was less busy when you visited it, at a point in time when everywhere was less busy, nothing to do with overall sales

Edit: sorry not OP

I’m not the original poster, but I would expect sales to correlate with “busy-ness”. To your point though, I guess if everyone was doing takeout, sales could still go up and the place could be empty. Where I’m located though, it seems like businesses have been open for dine in for months and people are filling the dining rooms

Yeah, fair as does depend on country (and region)

They were busier (for pickup) this winter than this summer. I checked my own order history at our previously favorite pizza place. We ordered about 5x/month from Nov ‘20-Mar ‘21 when large cheeses were $9+tax and there was often a line for pickup. We now order around 1x/month (at $13+tax) and walk directly to the counter.

If anything, CV19 is much less a safety concern now than before.

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre thing to comment on: yes the sales may have been higher, and anecdotally you may have seen longer pickup lines (at what times?), but you gotta understand why it reads as a joke, because regardless of above, in-person business is almost universally likely to have been lower, restricted to pickups clustered at specific times

As a VP does that $4 difference really mean anything to you?

We've switched many of our family's Friday night pizza nights to "make pizza at home". Can I afford $4 more? Of course. Do I see the same level of value in a ~50% more expensive pizza? Of course not.

What you actually need to do is keep your prices the same while everyone else raises their prices and collect all their business, then you can afford to pay your workers more. But the end effect is the same, less work for people.

>But the solution to that is a proper social safety net

Playing devils advocate with your logic, how is this different from preventing the market from “clearing” non-viable businesses? I.e., don’t many safety net programs essentially subsidize business profits by allowing employers to lower wages?

It's different because allowing people to work for low wages gives them a chance to improve their skills and move up to higher wage jobs rather than perpetually living off welfare.

Or it traps them in a cycle of poverty where there’s never enough time or money to make the skills necessary to advance. When I worked as a dishwasher or landscaper, I wasn’t building valuable skills to progress my career. Maybe your point holds for some careers, but I’m doubtful it’s relevant to most low-wage (especially non-skilled) labor. I think the point is also diluted when considering there’s almost always more people at the lower end of these jobs than the higher, meaning everybody can’t always be advancing. There will always be more dishwashers than restauranteurs (ignoring automation)

For some people the skills they need to develop first are really basic, like showing up on time and sober, and following basic instructions. We're talking about the lowest tier of the workforce here where the concept of a "career" is kind of alien. Many of them have never been formally employed before and need an opportunity to learn really simple things that most of us take for granted. I think most HN users are disconnected from that reality.

This comes across as one of those talking points where an employer exploits a worker under the guise they are almost doing them a favor. (See: NCAA athletes or unpaid interns).

I think this take is a caricature of low wage employees. It’s kinda similar to the talk I occasionally hear about the enlisted ranks in the military. “That’s just for losers and dropouts” or to that effect.

My experience is that those low wage jobs can just as easily be filled with every segment of the spectrum from incredibly smart and competent to those who struggle with basic life tasks. The commonality seems to be they were all disadvantaged in some way. Maybe it was a strained family life or disability or sick relative but the necessity of them taking the job couldn’t be boiled down to something as simple as they couldn’t get their shit together

> like showing up on time and sober, and following basic instructions

Poor people are not stupid, or unambitious, and have the same addiction rates as the rich. Of course, rich addicts go to rehab, and poor addicts are imprisoned.

When they try to work their way up at places like Walmart, and get fucked over again and again even when they are taking time off to serve in the military[1], they recognize that the system is rigged and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

There is not a single state where working full time at one minimum wage job is enough to pay for an apartment. [2] That's why more than 5 million people work more than one job. They are trying to beat the system. They want an education and a career. But our society does not provide a realistic path for them to achieve any of those goals.

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/2021/01/05/walmar...

[2] http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2012-OOR.pdf

Do you understand that most peoppe on welfare and/or section 8 housing also are required to work shitty jobs in order to receive those “handouts”?

Very few people leave poverty in the usa because of many factors that have nothing to do with welfare.

The relationship between minimum wage and employment is profoundly complex and the empirical data is inconsistent with the simple supply and demand model many believe in. There are many documented cases of increases in minimum wage resulting in reduced unemployment.

Ugh, gross. That’s just slavery with extra steps.