Aren’t minimum wage raises responsible for this? If restaurants are forced to pay $15 an hour minimum, how can it be profitable without them being more productive?
It may surprise you to learn that most businesses employ minimal staffing no matter what the min. wage is.
I worked for $5.25 an hour as a teenager, and that doesn't mean they just employed more people and we all took it easy. I would challenge the assertion that a business would not optimize worker output just because they are cheaper (and cheaper is relative, I'm sure even when it was lower the business owners still claimed it was too high).
Lastly, there are many ways a business divides its costs and there are many ways to be successful, even if sharing more profits with workers. Just ask Costco.
Businesses used to be a part of their communities.
We’ve suffered a breakdown of the sense of community, and a failure in education resulting in growth in the number of people that continue to believe the fallacy that a business primary function is to maximise value to shareholders.
A business is ultimately a collection of people coming together for mutual benefit. If it stops being mutually beneficial and/or only becomes beneficial for some people if some other people are exploited, it probably shouldn’t continue to be.
