in the grocery business they tend to very quickly pay more than min wage anyway, with decent service way above which is why the checker you see at your corner store has been there for 20 years and really knows her shit, the razor thin margin is on the cost of goods markup, the operational overhead on that massive throughput is there but its not really as much of a factor as you'd think, the real factor in grocery is no, we can't sell that for 1.99 it really does have to be 2.09 or there's just no profit in it so we have to shrink the package to make that nice 1.99 price point which is why you see f'ing 11oz boxes of cereal.
see this is a great case in point, if min wage even doubled that would not mean that all our wages would double at all, really it would just be the handful of new people right at the bottom and yes that would put wage pressure on those above them but that could be accommodated over time. as for phd's that cant predict what would happen, these are the people that couldn't see the housing crash coming, you and I would have no problem mapping out what would happen. some really basic forces are at work here and you have to look at the entire economy to see why an big min wage hike is the best thing we could do, its actually pretty simple, money is getting to concentrated at the top up there it just doesn't move through the economy enough, not enough sectors and not quickly enough, thats whats killing us so the solution is to shovel more money right to the bottom, fast as you can, fastest way is min wage, next fastest way is tax and spend and the latter has a massive overhead of overpaid politicians and government contractors who are in the 1% so you lose a lot of the juice that way.
when you look at it that way, the details of how it plays out at every end point dont matter, the reality is yes ultimately someone who had a wasteful business with too many employees simply because they were so cheap why not is forced to cut back and lay people off. but that's missing the forest, that person leaves, and their parent or spouse who's making much more has already lifted some of the burden and because the economy is growing fast again a new much better paying job opens up very soon, the logic that someone might ever get laid off so we should all just go down with the ship is kinda not gonna work here, this is the information age, data will power the revolution, we have to be a shitload smarter about the whole picture if we are going to survive.
so how did we get here? when most of us here were born things were in balance, what happened? at first, a really really good thing: the women's liberation movement a tremendous boon for woman and their families, sure we had to go through a generation of growing pains (latch key kids) before those kids grew up and still managed to put kids first, but thats to be expected, its a new thing, hard to see how it would all play out ahead of time. at first this meant that women didn't have to stay with abusive husbands because of money and that blue collar families could become middle class families, and middle class families could become upper middle class families and it was great, great on top of already pretty good.
however, what we failed to see what the effect on the labor market, a new surplus of labor started the downward trend, top that off with employers to this day getting away with paying women less for the same job then the boiling frog kicker, bit by bit that hard economic pressure of i just cant afford to take a job for anything less than... changes, kids started school, wife took a modest admin job and suddenly that job with the better commute and lower pay is within reach so you begrudgingly take it, you get a few raises but they never catch up to old job + inflation and then there's a big voodoo economic downturn that your employer uses to freeze wages, you don't walk out because eh well, there's still food on the table with what my wife is bringing in. over 20 years the trend is set, wages sliding backwards against inflation then it becomes the norm then even with 2 wages in the house its not enough to stay on top of everything, inflation no longer even keeps tabs with healthcare, education, housing that all just spiral out of site and in the new economy 2 decent wages feels like that meager entry level blue collar job in 1970, just getting by, then one of you gets sick and suddenly a family with one white collar income is hanging by a thread.
this all happens because price competition on a loaf of bread is not the same as wage competition in a free market, choosing another place or brand for your bread is extremely liquid, that can change daily, but your job? a thing that might require a different town, school district, house? you can feel ripped off for years before you are willing to move and then you will find that because everyone else feels the same way, there isnt a better paying job out there. something has to balance out that lack of liquidity, self employment and small business opportunities are the ideal balance, my employer should be competing with my ability to go out on my own, when you run your own small business your net output is totally maxed, its the very most the economy can get out of one person in terms of productivity so we want to encourage that above all but that alone wont get the engine started, there has to be wage pressure at the bottom and it has to come from outside business, they wont do it on their own but when required to across the board, they stay on the same level playing field with their competitors something they could not have done by being the first guy to pay better. with that influx you have growth and with growth small businesses can get off the ground, then you have a healthy cycle that can sustain itself with a whole lot less government intervention.
