Let's pay 16 year olds $31.2k to sweep floors!!!!

[Nye Bevan]

36. Can I try to address this question seriously, in contrast to the snarky "you're a Republican"

responses?

So the question is what happens when a business is paying someone $9 per hour to do something like sweep a floor, the employee is happy to be paid that amount for performing that job, and then the minimum wage is raised to $15 per hour which would obviously be excellent for the employee but not possible or realistic for the business to pay.

The answer is automation. There will be an absolute boom in things like self-checkouts in supermarkets and automated ordering kiosks in fast-food restaurants. These devices are not cost-free, of course; retailers always have to weigh the cost of installation and maintenance against the cost of hiring an employee to do the same thing. Say the cost of having 5 self-checkout machines amounts to $11 per hour of operation, amortizing the initial cost over the machines' life and factoring in maintenance and repairs. Right now many retailers would take a pass because they can hire employees to do the checking-out for cheaper. But if you would have to pay those employees $15 per hour the self-checkouts become an absolute no-brainer.

And what about sweeping the floor? Instead of a kid with a broom, who would suddenly cost you $15 per hour, you pay a floor-sweeping contractor to do the job for you. He has state-of-the-art machinery and is able to do the job quickly, and for many other clients as well as you. Investing in the machinery suddenly makes a lot of sense when you are not competing with a kid with a broom at $9 per hour.