These places are paying $25,000 a month in rent. The additional minimum wage is so small compared to that figure.
* A long history of slavery followed by systemic disenfranchisement, creating an underclass of poorly-educated people with few job skills and difficulty obtaining any employment.
* A slightly-shorter-but-still-long history of using labor from people not legally allowed to be in the country, to whom protections (including the minimum wage) apply only sporadically or not at all.
* Collapse of labor unions (happening now in Australia, I gather, but ongoing for four or five decades in the US)
* Active, well-funded hostility to minimum wage laws, driven in part by a strong temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire ethos[1] in which people believe they will one day be rich and don't want their wealth siphoned off by the undeserving poor (even if they are, currently, poor themselves).
* Even more racism, in which the minimum wage is seen as a giveaways to brown-skinned people who would not otherwise be able to earn it.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-socialism-never-took...
oh the greed
If there are no 7.50 an hour or 1 dollar an hour employees they need to pay at least $15.
If someone is valued at less than 15 the owner still has to pay more. Same as in sports there is only one Michael Jordan you may value his services at 7.50 an hour but others will pay millions. Either you overpay or your position goes unfilled.
If the market values your labor at $25/hr, neither you or I care whether the minimum wage is $7.50/hr or $15/hr (with respect to you).
If you can create $10/hr of value for a business, I think there's a reasonable argument that it's better for you to be able to have a job at $8 or $9/hr than to declare that arrangement illegal and force you to either be unemployed or find an employer who is willing to for whatever reason to pay you $5/hr more than than the value you contribute to the business.
Minimum wage simply creates a market floor.
Removing the floor creates a new cheap labor market where Americans are shut out because they can't afford to live in that wage group. That's why the cost of living should be connected to min wage.
Take vegetable picking as an example. No one will pay an American min wage so they can't fill those jobs. They want 3 dollars an hour workers. No American can afford to live on that so they are shut out of those jobs. They import temp workers who can convert $3 American to $20.00 their currency and can live a higher standard of living to their peers.
Removing the floor killed thousand of American jobs. Why would we import it to other industries?