Seems like an oversimplification to me. If the owners could simply raise prices by 20% and suffer no economic consequences, I have little doubt they would. Thus, I can only surmise that it is not as simple as that.
I know it sounds crazy because we've had them for so long, but maybe it's not sustainable to have so many of them?
In any case, this seems like a great area to let the market figure it out. If restaurants go out of business the owners and employees will find something else to do.
I'm not sure more corporate concentration would be a better situation.
And even if it does, why should restaurants be held to a higher standard than other sectors? It's fine for Google and Facebook to buy up everything, but restaurants can't consolidate?
If all the restaurants did at the same time, they could. But if only some do, then the restaurants that underpay their workers will have lower prices and outcompete them out of business.
You can look at this an yet another example of the core problem where consumers don't have visibility into the externalities of the purchasing choices. When picking a restaurant, you see the food prices, but you don't see that one restaurant is more expensive because it treats its workers better. That's an encapsulated abstraction. So we choose based on price, which inadvertently incentivizes restaurants to treat employees like crap.
I think people on HN may be forgetting the restaurant industry does not have the same margins as tech ... and close to no one working these jobs (on the employee side) is ever hoping to stay there for decades.