It depends upon how you define "success." I visit California regularly, and since the new minimum wage law went into effect, I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices. So now my normal breakfast spot isn't open when I want to go there, so I eat at home. The places I visit when they are open are mostly empty, because the customers don't want to wait longer and/or pay higher prices.
So aside from the fewer employees getting a raise, the businesses are now under financial stress because of the reduced revenue, the customers have fewer options for where to eat, and the State of California and the local city/county governments will receive less tax revenue from these restaurants.
Like most of the other recent California legislation, it's a "success" at further damaging the local economy and encouraging people like myself to stay away.
Is your usual breakfast spot a location with more than 60 locations? The minimum wage increase here only applied to chains with more than 60 locations.
A lot of what you're describing is nation-wide. Food is more expensive everywhere. Cost of living in California is up significantly. Rents for restaurants is significantly higher as well (at least anecdotally, my wife's family restaurant has to close because they doubled the rent after their lease was up, I have heard this is incredible common).
This study by UC Berkeley attributed a 3.7% increase in food price because of the minimum wage changes. It's quite likely that food overall getting more expensive is responsible for a lot of what you're seeing.
If we can't afford to pay people in California a wage where they can live here, then maybe the economy overall isn't sustainable? A $20 minimum wage is like $2800 take home per month and in many places that can barely cover rent.
You are correct that I was unable to summarize an incredibly complex tangled web of economics, sociology and politics in a few hundred words on a forum. I don't think any of us can do this. Of course it's an oversimplification. Is the comment I'm replying to also not doing this? Are you also not doing the same thing?
My only point is that this seems like an awful lot of confirmation bias. Something everyone suffers from.
Not all people suffer the same level of confirmation bias, especially across all topics. And, for most topics, broad consensus of experts is better and less biased than individuals.
A better example would be Los Angeles and the new $30 per hour minimum wage for hotel and airport workers. Conceptually it makes sense. The crux of the issue and some opposition is there are more people now who use those jobs for primary income for a family, where in the past it may have been perceived as jobs for supplemental income and no health benefits.
The problem is a California tax law that lets home owners pay the tax rate from when they bought the home despite the value increasing. It disincentives selling. Which leads to retirees sitting on family homes rather than relocating and releasing them back into the market.
How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things? If you think that, you are a sick person and I have to imagine you are younger and only thinking "but I want that nice house, so f*k off old person, take some money and go die somewhere else."
Old people should not be prioritized over the young.
A 600% increase in property taxes over 7 years is an extreme outlier. Zero of my friends or family have ever once experienced such a thing happening.
I certainly am not a fan of how heavy my property taxes are in one of the heaviest taxed cities in the US - but I would absolutely vote down anything resembling something like Prop 13. It's an immoral bit of tax code that favors old people over the young and productive - like seemingly most of our current policy.
I should not be paying a different rate than the young couple moving in next door to me simply because I got here first. The services need to be paid all the same regardless of my age.
> How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things?
Yes, obviously. I have this giant asset called property I can sell and downsize to something reasonable in retirement. Or in the worst case - move. I could also use the equity in my home to pay for living expenses if I must. This was considered normal and expected just a couple generations ago.
This whole "let the old eat their young" streak of society needs to die off sooner than later.
Letting some old person stay in their lifelong home is not the old eating the young. Kicking that old person out of their home literally is the young killing off the old.
Old people don’t need to monopolize real estate the way they have over the past 40ish years.
At least when being subsidized by the young via tax rates. The old voted themselves in a benefit at the expense of those taking care of them - it’s not sustainable. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. I say this as someone far closer to “old” than young. I should be paying exactly the same amount as my young neighbors for the same house value. Anything different is immoral at best.
The young productive couple with kids has far more utility being located closer to work and other economic opportunity than a retired couple, so retirees sitting on the most productive bits of real estate is a problem beyond even taxes. That we forced young couples to buy places out in the exurbs and spend hours a day commuting while also trying to raise kids would be laughable to an alien species looking at us from a big picture standpoint.
We have an inverted sense of priorities at the moment - likely due to demographics and voting power. These will rapidly shift as demographics change, hopefully without too much backlash over what we have done to the young.
If we want to make a point that overall property taxes are too high in general I’m much more receptive to that idea. No (residential) property owner should be privileged over another due to age.
The price is the price. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten avocado toast so much and saved more for retirement?
Renters have to move all the time, regardless of where they built a life and have all their things, many times because their income is being taken to subsidize people living on large lots (earned income tax is stupid, it’s working people paying for the rent seekers who get to enjoy living and profiting from larger spaces).
Another option is to have multiple kids, and bet that a few might support you in your old age.
Also, I would like to see which region nominal property taxes increased 6x in 7 years. I research real estate all around the US, and I have never seen anywhere close to that increase. You can link to a Zillow link of any random home in the broader region, as they all would have experienced the same rise.
Property tax rates are usually 0.5% to 2.5% of market value, and you would be in very rarified company if the market value of your house went up 6x from 2017 to 2024.
This comes across as if you want people to work for your convenience but without paying for it. You are not obligated to the output of other peoples' work. The subway isn't open that early? It wasn't cost effective to pay the people according to that store based on the amount of business they got.
You are utterly dependent on complex supply chains and would find it extremely difficult to continue to survive if something ever happened to most or all of those chains.
It is rich of you to support a law that interfered with one kind of supply chain and then to lecture someone who gave a detailed description of harms that probably are effects of the interference.
Although it is true that a person is "not obligated [you meant entitled] to the output of other peoples' work," that does not mean that enough interference by ham-handed governmental policies won't make everyone significantly worse off -- because we all make extensive use of complex chains of economic transfer.
It's been a long time since I worked in the SoCal fast food scene, but it's been decades since it was true that a majority of the workers were students.
> I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices
Anecdotally, this also describes how things have played out in the South generally. (Southern states generally have no set minimum wage, so they mostly default to the $7.25/hr set in 2009.) Perhaps this is different in other regions?
I have similarly stopped going to most "fast" food restaurants because the waits are interminable.
This is in states where an hour of minimum-wage labor will not gross you enough money to buy a pound of store-brand ground beef.
> Southern states generally have no set minimum wage, so they mostly default to the $7.25/hr set in 2009.
You may be shocked to learn this, but just because they follow the minimum wage doesn’t mean companies are _actually_ paying minimum wage. Even in my southeastern state, McDonald’s is paying $12/hour. Why? Because there’s no takers, even in a LCOL area, at $7.25/hour! That’s why all this handwringing over the federal is so stupid. Local labor markets will dictate what an acceptable wage is.
That's great, I live in a HCOL area in a Southern state and McDonald's here also pays higher than federal minimum.
BUT in other parts of the state, especially rural areas, there are definitely jobs advertised for < $8/hr. In those areas, McDonald's is paying a premium wage compared to Local Burger Joint. McDonald's pays $12/hr so they can get a higher caliber of employee than Local Burger Joint. Neither pay as much as Perdue.
> what an acceptable wage is
We agree on this, but probably on what factors go into making a wage "acceptable" and the degree to which taxpayers in other parts of the state/country should have to subsidize those wages/owners' profits via social support programs.
(I understand there is a third group of people who don't really care if the working poor are able to eat, but in the spirit of charity I do not assume anybody willing to engage in discourse is in that group.)
> since the new minimum wage law went into effect, I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that in the meantime:
- unemployment has declined, which means it's harder to find people wanting to work in such a place.
- inflation has kicked in, raising prices over the board.
In that context, attributing the changes you've seen to a particular policy is very very hard (and the linked paper doesn't do a better job than what you do here…).
Most of those in favor of the government interference cite the points that you made. They don't really ring true though. Inflation has slowed, but the changes in the restaurants were sudden, and coincided with the new wage law.
Is your normal breakfast spot a fast food joint? If it is not, it is my understanding that is not affected by the "higher minimum wages for fast food workers" regulation.
If it is a fast food joint... well, I can't speak for all of California, but the fast food places in the section of San Francisco that I live (and roam around) in seem to have a reasonably healthy amount of customers in them.
Perhaps things are different where you are, but I've noticed food getting markedly more expensive, have heard of commercial rents getting higher and higher, and have heard that many of the folks who would have done waitstaff jobs have decided to fuck off for places that were (at the time, if not now) less expensive than California. Oh, and there was the whole "flight from the expensive cities because WFH means that many folks don't have to tie themselves to an expensive, small apartment in a city they don't really like" thing a while back that gutted the downtowns (and leisure districts) of some-to-many big cities because -like- many folks exercised their new option to leave and left.
Were it me, I'd consider blaming factors like those before I blamed modest increases in wages.
I’d point to savings-driven relocation as well. It’s why some suburban towns have seen an increase in number of restaurants even as options in cities decline.
If the desire is to reverse that trend, the best way to move the needle is to bring housing prices (by far the largest living expense) in cities back down to earth so they’re affordable to normal people again, however that’s best done (probably building more housing, unlike SF which decided to instead prioritize offices and retail, leaving it vulnerable when the pandemic hit).
Restaurants have a lot of competition, and low margins. Like any other employer, they can offer jobs at low wages (or at least could, until the government got involved). People are under no obligation to accept a job with low wages, but some do. By definition the employees are not slaves, because they can quit at any time.
Employers offer wages that the labor market will bear. Some jobs are mostly unskilled labor, and the pay is appropriate. Restaurant workers get tips, and I am usually very generous. Apparently tipping has become much less popular lately.
Notable exceptions to skill vs. wages include things like the Longshoremen in the Port of Los Angeles, who belong to a union that extorts the shipping industry. There is no justification whatsoever for the high salaries they earn.
> People are under no obligation to accept a job with low wages.
This is the wrong premise you are basing your entire conviction on.
When you don't have an alternative to working then it is not a jobmarket as you are not in a position do not transact.
This is the same reason why the housingmarket is not a market the second people do not have alternatives to buy into overpriced rents.
A free market requires that participants can decide not to transact. A pro-market government makes sure that this is is the case to a reasonable extend.
But this is more like a return of slavery, not its abolition.
It is like when slavery was abolished, someone would protest against it, arguing that slavery cannot be abolished, since the masters feeds their slaves, takes care of them, treats and educates them, and if slavery is abolished, the standard of living of former slaves will fall sharply.
You need to factor rent increases into your thinking, both commercial and residential. Your breakfast spot is a business that no longer makes financial sense to operate.
Feed the location of a business into a trip planner and note every neighborhood within reasonable commute radius. Calculate the average cost of renting a room in these areas and then multiply by three. That's your de facto minimum wage because you have no applicant pool beneath it.
Adding on to this, your competitors in a better financial position are all paying well above minimum. There's probably a McDonalds across the street starting people at five bucks an hour more than you, and they have that wage plastered on a banner right out front.
If everything you wrote above is true (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then the labor market should self adjust to the local economy and the government shouldn't need to step in and dictate a minimum wage.
So aside from the fewer employees getting a raise, the businesses are now under financial stress because of the reduced revenue, the customers have fewer options for where to eat, and the State of California and the local city/county governments will receive less tax revenue from these restaurants.
Like most of the other recent California legislation, it's a "success" at further damaging the local economy and encouraging people like myself to stay away.