“Many business owners are blaming the 36 percent wage hike, while some said the businesses were already in financial distress.”
Whether they were in distress or not, the jobs are now definitely gone.
What is totally missed there, is that this was the final straw for those businesses. They can’t admit to that.
As you said, the jobs are gone. Eh, what’s a few tens or hundreds of jobs anyway. This is America, land of the under employed.