Minimum wages reduce some of the exploitation that low quality employers will always engage in. If you travel to a state that has the lowest minimum wage for waitresses, you won’t find more waitstaff, lower prices or better quality. Just more misery. Any further erosion of worker rights in this gilded age is gross and unacceptable.
Get yourself a breakfast omelette plate in San Francisco and the same order in Jackson, MS. I can pretty much guarantee that the plate in Jackson will be less, possibly 50% less.
* I don’t claim it’s caused by the minimum wage difference, but it seems pretty strongly correlated.
For instance, I searched "Brunch" in Google Maps for Jackson and omelette plates are $10-16 at Google's top result[1].
Labor costs certainly impact prices, but restaurant pricing isn't totally formulaic outside of maybe "market price" fish dishes. Kenji Lopez Alt has written about this[2]:
Here's where one of the first intricacies in menu pricing arises: Menu prices have to make sense to the customer. Placing a $15 carrot entree and a $20 chicken dish next to a $40 mushroom dish and a $45 steak doesn't compute; the range is simply too big. Either the latter two dishes are far too expensive, or the first two are far too cheap. Which sceniaro seems true largely depends on the atmosphere of the restaurant and pricing at similar restaurants, but both cases can be disconcerting.
Because of this, most successful restaurant owners fudge the numbers a bit. "You're willing to lose money on some things because they're important to keep on the menu," says Maws.
Some of that may be on you, choosing to eat the expensive food.
My experience in Shanghai was that I could eat basically the same things I'd eat in America, and it would cost basically the same amount of money. Or I could eat local food for 5-10 times less than that.
But you know, if I go to 老外街 ("foreigner street") in Shanghai to eat at the Mexican restaurant there, it's not exactly a secret that I may be willing to pay more for food than a normal Chinese person. And they price accordingly.
Rents are probably considerably higher in NYC too, especially restricting to Manhattan.
In addition she is even more likely to make use of state services like food stamps and medicaid which in effect you and I help pay for even if we don't even live in that state let alone eat at that diner.
I don't think its cheaper its just subsidized by everyone.
(In practice, those places still have minimum wages - it's just that they're negotiated between employers and unions, and can vary across different industries and geographically where that makes sense.)
The real problem with min wage is that it's effectively a regressive tax, because it raises the cost of the cheapest produced goods/services - which, of course, tend to be disproportionally used by those who simply can't afford anything else. So you're taxing the poor to help the very poor! It is better compared to a free-for-all jungle, but it's much worse than e.g. UBI (funded by actual progressive taxes, on income, or better yet, on capital gains) without min wage.
You now have a segment of the population with enough work and another with too little. Those with work are scared of losing the job. Those without are desperately trying to compete in the labor market to get a new job.
For employment, for instance, much more useful analysis comes out of lifetime income analysis. We really ought not care how many people earn minimum wage... we ought to really care how their wage changes over time. Not even suggesting that there isn't merit to a minimum wage, but just that our discourse of it almost always omits the point you bring up about "everyone else who suffers." That's important to talk about.