We're not talking about a multinational chain spanning continents with billions of dollars in revenue, tens of thosands of employees and a NYSE stock ticker - and not just any ticker but a part of S&P 500! Such a corporation has a lot of means to raise salaries a little without going under, they could borrow millions, they could issue stock, they could sell assets (which they have in millions), could restructure business, etc. etc.

We were talking about a single shop owner which usually doesn't measure revenues in billions and runs everything out of his own pocket and bank loans usually backed by the same pocket. If you don't understand the difference, maybe giving advice to businesses shouldn't be your primary pastime.

> How does he know for certain? He never even tried raising prices.

Sure, such a thought would never come to his mind without your help. And surely, a business owner would never know a thing about his own business and his own pricing without you instructing him on it with such a sage advice as "just try it!". Maybe tons of people would line up for $50 tacos and only the stupidity of business owners - which, as one, for some reason, choose to ignore your advice to just try it, which would make them billionaires - prevent it from happening. Seriously. How much disdain one must have for people actually living the thing...

this is a ridiculously disingenuous argument. it doesn’t take a $50 taco to pay a living wage, no matter what the size of the business is.

"living wage" is an emotional political term - there's no objective definition of it and instead of appealing to rational argument it appeals to irrational notion that somehow you can live on $20/hr but would die if you received $19/hr, and so it's somehow a moral imperative to pay $20/hr (and in a year it turns out it's already $25 that is a moral imperative because somehow, out of nowhere, prices have risen!).

I'm not talking about literally $50.00 for a taco. I am talking about business owners who I'd assume know their business a bit better than a rando from the internet. And about the necessity of not thinking everybody but you missed a completely obvious solution like "just raise prices" because they don't understand anything about their business, but you do. It's usually not that simple.

Are there a lot of anecdotal stories of "I raised prices and I had to close shop because of drop in demand" ? All I see are people just shutting down and giving up.

The restaurant business is very hard. It’s not clear why anyone does it to be honest; the skills required to successfully manage a restaurant can net you a lot more for a lot less work in other industries. Of course people just throw in the towel. After getting kicked in the face by COVID why stand back and get kicked in the teeth again by government policy?

Drop in supply = higher taco prices in future anyway

> "living wage" is an emotional political term (...)

It really isn't. Either your wage is enough to allow you to cover the cost of living, or it doesn't.

By definition, any job which depends on supplemental income such as tipping to allow a worker to make ends meet is quite obviously not a living wage.

A living wage is defined in the dictionary as "a wage that is high enough to maintain a normal standard of living." Now we could argue about what a normal standard of living qualifies as but I think we can agree that it includes at minimum room & board for the individual.

By that meager definition a lot of restaurants don't pay a 'living wage'