The average profit margin for the restaurant and retail trade in Canada is just 3.4%. Your costs don't have to rise very high before you're forced to raise prices.
I posted the list of items in the "consumer goods basket" they use to calculate the rate of inflation. And the bulk of this stuff is completely unaffected by the minimum wage.
FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).
Housing, transportation, medical, education and communication are all completely unaffected by the minimum wage. (what about the gas station cashier? The cashier's share of the 123.9 cents per liter is so tiny it's not worth measuring. Most of the 123.9 cents per liter is going to the gasoline distributor or to the tax man. The station operator's share is tiny, and the cashier's portion of that is tinier still. Gas stations don't make much money from gas. They're desperately hoping you'll buy a $2 chocolate bar or a $4 bag of chips while you're stopped for gas, because that's where they actually make a decent margin.)
Food and clothing are two areas where the minimum wage might cause cost increases. Quite a few people work in a grocery store, and probably many of them are pretty close to the minimum wage. If I go down to my local grocery store and spend $100 on food, what portion goes to the food producers and distributors, what portion goes to the owner's non-labor expenses (rent, property tax, electricity, etc) and what portion actually goes to the workers? Hypothetically, if the workers' share is $5, and the owner raises the prices to pay for the increase in wages, then my $100 groceries will cost $101.40 next time. I can live with it.
As for apparel, I suspect it's a higher-margin industry and a less directly competitive industry. I think they'll have a lot more flexibility as to how to figure out how to defray the expense of higher wages.
As well, apparel is a much smaller chunk of a typical consumer's monthly spending, so any increases in costs are much less important to most consumers than changes in the price of food.
For the typical household, housing is the biggest expense by a fair margin, followed by food, communications, and transportation in some order. Of those, only food is one where a raise to minimum wage might be cause for concern. And I think the impact on your grocery tab is probably pretty modest.
These people don't owe you a job, let alone a well-paid job. Why is it their responsibility that you don't have the skills to command higher wages? They should just willingly fork over a substantial portion of their profits to you? They can just close the place down and use their money on the stock market.
Good. Let 'em. There's something fundamentally
**** about an industry which is on the one hand always crying that it can't get enough workers but on the other hand always crying that it can't afford to raise wages to attract anybody to work there.
We don't need a
**** Tim Horton's on every corner. Let these would-be franchise operators take their capital and do something more useful with it. Let the displaced workers go work at other establishments that are relying on TFWs to fill vacancies.
Has it occurred to you that getting people to work in crappy low-skill restaurant jobs might be one of the reasons our government is convinced that we have to increase immigration every year?
-k