Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bloomberg ran a nice piece on what it's like to own a McDonald's franchise here [1]. The raw numbers sound nice - $2.7 million gross, $1.8 million in gross profit. But after your various expenses come into play, the honeymoon ends - you end up taking home about $150k for a mountain of work that's required to keep a franchise running in good shape. You're buying a job. The reason this matters is because those numbers…
Raise prices then. Wages are usually said to be a lesser part of the cost of a restaurant. Raise prices 10%. The gross goes up $270k, give yourself 20k more, give your employees 250k more. They get a 50% raise, that will make people want to work for you. My hamburger costs $3.30 instead of $3. In Seattle the restaurant industry said it was going to be all doom and gloom when they raised wages incrementally to $15/hou…
I think the biggest issue here is determining results. Did the wage increase work, or not? The problem is that you can create compelling hindsight arguments showing either argument. And indeed there are now numerous studies that all show different results. None are lying, they're just prioritizing and organizing data in different ways. The problem is this introduces bias. If you want to show it was a good idea, you can. If you want to show it was a bad idea, you can.
More needs to be done in terms of formal predictive hypotheses published ahead of time, rather than compiling data after the fact. In other words invite a large balance of both critics and proponents of minimum wage increases. Have these individuals come to a supermajority consensus on exactly what the goals would be in increasing the minimum wage and how the success or failure to meet these goals could be measured. And make the entire process completely visible and transparent. This, actually putting ideas to critical and impartial tests, would also hamstring demagoguery or accusations of such.