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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

> not because he pays them peanuts

Not paying peanuts still doesn't mean it's enough.

But if customers pay in peanuts and you have to offer staff cashew or macadamias to attract enough skilled employees, you might find you have a non-viable business.

Then charge customers more. If they won't pay more, your product might not be worth it and your business was never viable.

Anyhow, my opinion as someone in the restaurant business, the blogger's business had plenty of flaws.

> If they won't pay more, your product might not be worth it and your business was never viable.

That's what I wrote.

This is my general response whenever these types of articles appear. If your labor costs are insanely high, you need to raise prices. If people won't pay more for your products, you need to create better products worth more money, give staff equity and reduce profit, or shut down.

These types of articles are based on the assumption that we would like to continue having restaurants & the fact that they are (slowly) becoming economically nonviable is a social problem.

If rising prices reduced the demand so much that they become economically nonviable, then it means that we actually don't like having restaurants all that much, otherwise we'd pay.

Voting with your wallet is only one way of expressing a preference. San Francisco in particular also likes to vote with its votes. We may not care enough about restaurants to pay what they really cost, but by all accounts we’ll care enough to vote for a ballot measure that makes “big developers” and “the techies” pay for them.

Indeed, residents of Bay Area definitely like trying to vote away the microeconomics of supply and demand.

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