Third in a series.

Re: “Shulman on Council Axiom: Don’t Offend Labor” 

Downtown restaurateur Alan Shulman said that when the Los Angeles City Council blithely passed a minimum hourly wage of $15, ultimately, their perspective was too simplistic.

“When you do something like this,” he said, “you are not just talking about raising minimum wage. You are talking about Workmen’s Comp insurance, about payroll taxes, and then you factor into the whole equation the healthcare situation.”

Here is where the hourly increase starts to negatively affect others.

“All that I just have mentioned,” said Mr. Shulman, “has to be factored into your costs, which means that, as a retailer, you have to raise your prices proportionately to accommodate all of those increases.

“When you factor in $15.25 an hour, which is what they have proposed for Los Angeles, you are increasing your labor, over four years, by 65 percent.”

Either that, said the owner of Akasha and now Sambar restaurants, “or we are going to take a $15 hamburger and sell it for $22.

“At some point,” Mr. Shulman said with finality, “the consumer is going to say ‘Enough.’”

Then what?

(To be continued)