$20 Minimum Wage Backfires as Restaurants See Orders Plummet | Hacker News Reader

$20 Minimum Wage Backfires as Restaurants See Orders Plummet

newsweek.com

5 pointsJimmc41411 comments

Highly, highly misleading title.

This is app delivery companies. Restaurants themselves are fine.

IOW, these app delivery companies are unable to sustain their business and should go out of business due to their inability to pay their workers a wage which doesn't require taxpayer welfare.

At least for pizza delivery, restaurants used to have their own drivers.

When it was slow, drivers would fold boxes, grate cheese, wash dishes, etc. There was always something to do, and the pizza place did fine paying a wage + delivery fee (for gas).

I don't see the advantage of external delivery companies, at least for a pizza place.

For pizza places the benefit is risk reduction and insurance cost savings. Drivers who get into accidents are a huge liability, but through risk-laundering of external drivers that all goes away.

Yet I worked at 10 pizza places during high school, and college, and not a single place cared. You brought your own car. And there are still many places that do this.

for the pizza place that's already doing it, there isn't one. but for all the other restaurants in the area, the Chinese place, the Thai place, the sushi place, it doesn't make sense for each of them to have their own drivers who then sit idle waiting for customers to want that specific cuisine when the driver could be busy driving food around, regardless of the restaurant. Seems more efficient to me, but I'm not a pizza place.

In California, when fast food employees were given a $20 minimum wage, the pizza delivery drivers were all laid off:

https://abc7.com/pizza-hut-layoffs-california-delivery-drive...

the pizza delivery drivers were all laid off

No. You're being wildly, extremely inaccurate.

The article says "two Pizza Hut franchises" plan to.

* These franchises are corporate owners of some Pizza Hit restaurants, a specific brand, not all Pizza Hut restaurants

* these restaurants are only in one part of California

* Pizza Hut is only a tiny, small percentage of all pizza companies in California

How did you get "all" from the cited article, which states "some restaurants of a specific brand"?

I doubt this number even equals 1% of all pizza places in all of California.

Please be accurate.

Worthy reading in parallel the National Restaurant Association’s “2024 State of the Restaurant Industry” report: https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-...

restaurants see orders plummet*

*according to two delivery app companies

To be fair, the opening sentence pretty much sets the stage that this is about ordering for delivery: “A law calling for a $20 minimum wage has led to brutal backlash as customers opt out of ordering delivery in Seattle, Washington. ”

"Livable wage not tennable as restaurants find out they can only operate on sub-substinence compensation" would be a better title

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