The New York Times Wonders Why San Francisco Waiters Are Disappearing, Blames Everything But $15/Hr. Minimum Wage

The New York Times struggles vainly to blame everything but San Francisco's $15/hour minimum wage (which goes into full effect on July 1) for the disappearance of table waiting jobs:

So burgers get more expensive as houses do. But even wealthy tech workers will pay only so much to eat one. “If we were to pay what we need to pay people to make a living in San Francisco, a $10 hamburger would be a $20 hamburger, and it wouldn’t make sense anymore,” said Anjan Mitra, who owns two high-end Indian restaurants in the city, both named Dosa. “Something has to give.”

If customers won’t buy $20 burgers, or $25 dosas, and the staff in the kitchen can’t be cut, that something is service. “And that is what we did — we got rid of our servers,” Mr. Mitra said.

This brings up an important point: productivity increases are a prerequisite to rising real wages. Today's waiters have the same productivity, more or less, as their predecessors a century ago; there's only so many people one person can feed in an hour. It's basically an unskilled job, so the competition for labor is essentially infinite.

The second quoted graf above brings up something Brian Doherty wrote in Reason back in 2013: if there is a social obligation to pay a "living wage", why does it only fall on business owners? In other words, if business owners need to raise prices to meet the new, higher payroll, why is there no similar obligation on the part of patrons to spend more? The circle-squarers of the left never consider these kinds of problems. Their utopias rely upon ignoring second-order effects.

Also:

The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.

I guess if those jobs don't exist, then it doesn't matter what they're "guaranteed".