OfTheCross
Veteran
What $15 Minimum Wage Would Mean for This Frozen Yogurt Shop Owner
Hornsby owns a frozen yogurt shop, a business he built from the ground up in 2013, in a small city in northwest Georgia.
With the exception of the manager and a few other employees, Hornsby employs primarily high school students. While he enjoys being able to provide so many young people with what is often their first job, he says he simply couldn’t afford to pay all his employees $15 an hour.
Simply increasing product prices is not something that Hornsby views as a viable option.
“I can’t just raise my prices equal to what the [wage] increase is, because I will lose too many customers. There is no doubt about it,” Hornsby, 54, said.
The shop offers 21 frozen yogurt flavors and more than 70 toppings. Right now, Hornsby charges customers 56 cents per ounce, and says raising his prices has always been a carefully calculated process. Every nine to 12 months, he usually raises the cost of his product by 1 cent or 2 cents per ounce, adding that he never wants to raise his prices so much that customers won’t come back.
If the minimum wage were double what he pays many of his employees now, his payroll cost would increase by 30% to 40%, and he would have “to raise prices not just 1 [cent] or 2 [cents] but 10 or 15 [cents an ounce],” he estimated.
at the "slave labor" argument when the Old Navy shirt that I'm wearing was made in Indonesia
right, there are levels to this.
Over a decade ago maybe, we need to be talking about 20.00 and above.