Sorry, but this nonsense about minimum wage driving restaurants out of business needs to be confronted.
Anybody who’s been thru Econ 101 knows that the main time a rise in costs leads to a massive wave of business closings is when the cost is imposed unevenly. IOW, if restaurants with names from A to L had to pay the higher wage, but restaurants with names from M to Z did not, then those with the names earlier in the alphabet would go out of business at a much higher rate.
If costs are imposed on an industry evenly, the primary economic effect is a rise in prices that is at least enough to cover the increase in costs. All businesses are still on an even competitive basis, with none getting a competitive edge from the change.
Now, the higher prices will lead, at least initially, to a drop in total sales for the industry, which will no doubt drive some of the less efficient operations out. But in most cases people will gripe for a bit and then return to their previous purchasing habits.
Restaurants close to the edge of the political boundary will have a competitive disadvantage compared to the place just across the line not forced to pay the higher wage, but that’s a relatively small effect.
Witness what happens to airlines every time there’s a spike in fuel prices. The main effect is that ticket prices go up. Or what’s happened to fast food burger prices over the last couple years. Beef prices went up, and so did all the burger prices. Nobody went out of business specifically because the price of their raw materials went up. Labor is a cost no different than beef or fuel, in this regard.
Restaurants aren’t all that price sensitive as an industry anyway, look at the enormous range of prices for a dinner. <$10 to $200+. For higher end restaurants, the cost of labor is a smaller percentage of their sales, so they are less affected than the low-rent places.
There are lots of good reasons to oppose a minimum wage, but that it will drive lots of restaurants out of business isn’t one of them.
In Econ 101, I seem to recall a notion of the price elasticity of demand.
Prices can only be raised to the extent people continue to purchase. If prices exceed that point, demand falls off, sometimes dramatically.
At that point, a few businesses may survive by selling high quality and high service to the very affluent. But all the rest of the businesses go under.
Your analysis seems to me to involve the same fallacy that drives liberals to raise taxes ever higher and higher. In the tax area, what they ignore is referred to as the Laffer Curve. At a certain level, people stop paying higher taxes. That’s why DemocRat budget projections are never correct.
No, business doesn’t work that way either. If it did, we could raise the minimum wage to $100 per hour, and we would all live happily ever after, eating rainbow stew and drinking free bubble up.
Fixed it.