Example, in North Dakota where you can get a union Costco job for 18$+/hr (or chick fila for 17/hr) there are plenty of places (including hospitals) offering 15$/hr and they can't find people to fill the slots. Your dog grooming is paying 11$/hr? That's just another business going bust.

Businesses who were on a shoestring fail and yuppies continue to move in. The regional+national inflation has simply left large chunks of business in the dust without very cheap (immigrant) labor. This causes the makeshift infrastructure to weaken and the communities start to come apart.

I was under the impression that Costco only had union employees in California and a couple east coast states. The vast, vast majority of Costco employees are not in a union.

Decades of wreckless government money printing for helicopter cash is catching up.

Wouldn’t this incentivize automation?

Incentives do not necessarily lead to accomplishments.

What does that even mean? How do you incentivize automation for things like surgical tool sterilization (the aforementioned 15$/hr) or pet grooming, for which there is no "automation". Especially when you're working with populations in the thousands or 10s of thousands (eg cities like Bismarck or Billings), who would invest in that? Amazon is dropping in distribution centers from time to time at 15$ an hour when a municipal area gets to be over 100k pop, but that's just one vendor and one vertical.