Study: Retail prices stable a year after Seattle minimum wage hike [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://www.retaildive.com/news/study-retail-prices-stable-a-year-after-seattle-minimum-wage-hike/417949/

The National Retail Federation officially opposes legislating a national rate for hourly workers. While workers' advocates say that current rates fail to provide a living wage, the NRF and many businesses warn that higher wages make layoffs and price increases more likely.

But a year after Seattle implemented significantly higher minimum pay, that outcome hasn’t come to pass, to the surprise of even University of Washington researchers themselves....

62% of employers said they expected to raise prices of goods and services because of the higher wages, and 10% of employers said they’d be forced to move their business. But subsequent analysis, done through a combination of “web scraping” and in-person visits to stores and restaurants, found few price increases.

"We looked in grocery stores, drugstores and other types of retail outlets—we were focusing on places where your middle class or low-income families would be more likely to shop," study leader Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington public policy professor, told Fast Company. "The fact that we didn't find very many price increases in those types of outlets was a little bit more surprising to us.”