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https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6503418-151/study-minimum-wage-increases-in-6-cities-working:
The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in Seattle are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study — and disagree about — the impact.
The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases in pay and no widespread job losses. That reinforces the conclusions the same group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers reached in 2017 after studying just in Seattle.
This time, the Berkeley researchers examined Seattle; San Francisco; Oakland, California; San Jose, California; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., where minimum wages at the end of 2016 ranged from $10 to $13.
"We find that they are working just as the policymakers and voters who enacted these policies intended," said Sylvia Allegretto, co-author of the report and co-chair of Berkeley's Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. "So far they are raising the earnings of low-wage workers without causing significant employment losses."
abstract https://www.nber.org/papers/w25043
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday September 28 2018, @12:05AM (2 children)
You seem to believe that Greaseblocks inc is a marxist enterprise that charges costs plus a small markup for its products. No business does this.
Prices are unrelated to costs except for the condition that Σprices must exceed Σcosts. (or the company will go broke.)
In a non-competitive area their costs are likely to be a small fraction of what they charge.
In your example greaseblocks(tm) will retail for the amount that maximizes profits. That may be slightly over production costs, especially in a high volume competitive market. but if they could charge a few cents more they would, even before their costs went up.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by ChrisMaple on Friday September 28 2018, @03:27AM
You appear to think that companies know what price levels will maximize their profits. It is to laugh.
Big, complex companies are run by people with a variety of motives. Profit is the motive that economists point at, and politicians tend to point at the profit motive also. There's more going on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @07:10AM
Fast food is a high volume, very low margin industry. They charge a small markup over their (tightly controlled) costs because if they don't, they tend to lose business and go down. So, yes, that's a business that counts its costs very carefully, and then charges a rate that is marginally over that.
No marxism needed.
Now if we're talking about bespoke luxury meals handcrafted by world-class molecular gastronomy experts, sure, the market will bear a hell of a markup. But that isn't anything resembling a minimum wage fast food mill the likes of which was examined in Seattle.