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Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

If you’re interested in this story, Google for “Tim Horton’s minimum wage Ontario” and you’ll find plenty of similar coverage, and not just Timmies... A few weeks ago, minimum wage was CA$11.60 an hour in Ontario, it’s now $14 an hour, and will increase to $15 in 2019. But most chain stores haven’t raised prices, so you get conflict, and where there’s conflict, there’s no end to the news coverage...

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Businesses in Ontario and Seattle were handed a perfect opportunity to raise their prices. Normally a price increase would cause a loss of business to competitors, but a price raise blamed on the minimum wage hike would have been tolerated much better.

- competitors should be raising their prices too, so there shouldn't be competitors to desert to - opponents of the wage hike will blame the government instead of the business for the wage hike - supporters of the wage hike should be happy to support the higher wages

Yet businesses in Ontario have responded by cutting employee benefits and increasing tip splitting, resulting in significant negative publicity and boycotts.

The companies do not need to raise prices, they have a few strategies to take:

1. Keep prices the same and hope to make it up on the increased traffic if competitors increase prices; employment costs stay the same.

2. Keep prices the same; adjusting the costs in employees to offset the higher value they must be returning.

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