Tweet [1]
… is from Buffalo Wild Wings’s CEO Sally Smith’s recent interview with the Wall Street Journal [2] (gated):
WSJ: How are minimum-wage increases affecting the way you make business decisions?
MS. SMITH: You look at where you can afford to open restaurants. We have one restaurant in Seattle, and we probably won’t be expanding there. That’s true of San Francisco and Los Angeles, too. One of the unintended consequences of rising minimum wages is youth unemployment. Almost 40% of our team members are under age 21. When you start paying $15 an hour, are you going to take a chance on a 17-year-old who’s never had a job before when you can find someone with more experience?
(HT Doug Irwin)
Makes sense – and keep in mind the point of this earlier post [3], as well as the research of Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West [4].