So a Big Mac is only going to go up 17 cents with the minimum wage increase.

[thesquanderer]

60. The article is deceptive.

It says "Researchers at the university note that a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour would increase fast food prices by only 4.3 percent" and extrapolated that would be 17 cents on a big Mac. But while researchers could estimate what the new wage will add to costs, that does not tell us what it will add to retail price. McDonald's could choose to (a) absorb some portion of the cost, and/or (b) cover the cost unequally, adding more than 4.3 percent to some products while adding less than 4.3 Percent (or nothing) to others. There is no way for a researcher to know know what McD will actually do, just from looking at cost data. Fast food places do not use simple cost-based pricing. For example, they usually have a number of dollar items, that would not all have identical costs. And overall, the profit margin (not just absolute dollars, but the percentage of the price that is profit) is generally higher on, say, a full-price chicken sandwich than on the dollar version.