Seattle Restaurants Scramble To Pay A Higher Minimum Wage

NPR reports:

Restaurants in Seattle are booming. Amazon and other tech companies are on a hiring spree, and that's been like manna from heaven for the city's more than 4,000 eateries.

But in April, the city's minimum wage rose to $11 an hour, and it will keep rising every year to $15 an hour and beyond. Restaurants are now scrambling to figure out how they will pay.

No major city has ever seen an across-the-board 60 percent increase in its minimum wage. Restaurants employ about a quarter of Seattle's minimum wage workers. Labor typically accounts for about third of a restaurant's costs.

How many low skilled workers are about to find out the demand for labor is a downward sloping curve?