When Seattle’s minimum wage is on the verge of being raised to 15 dollars an hour, restaurants throughout the city are warning their employees serious cutbacks on staff and employment.
While the minimum wage at the current moment stands at 9.32 dollars an hour within the city, starting April 1 the wage will be raised to 11 dollars for employees, but the real problem with companies is that if they employ 500 or less employees then they will be forced to raise the minimum wage to 15 an hour by the end of 2019.
While most restaurants see little profit margins after having to pay for employees, food costs, and other miscellaneous expenses to run the restaurant, many believe that the price of food within these restaurants will unavoidably have to be risen to make sure that these restaurants make any sort of profit in the future.
CEO of the Washington Restaurant Association, Anthony Anton, told FoxNews.com that he shows great concern over the change and, “It won’t be one thing. This is too big a change to have a silver bullet,” meaning that this change will cause a major chain of events affecting the industry as a whole.
Anton is unsure what will happen, but did tell Fox how he believes that over time the restaurants within the city may try new things to keep up with sales and profit margins. One change could be automated serving machines and ordering machines.
When it comes down to it a restaurant just like all other industries is out to make as much money as possible. If they see an opportunity to save money, or to cut back on expenses like serving staff then they will unquestionably do so.
These changes will definitely make a lot of servers uneasy about their job security, and could make them feel expendable based on a companies need to cut back.
Brendan McGill, the chef and owner of the Hitchcock Restaurant Group, told Fox,
“It will be difficult to staff the front of the house as well as we have before,” and “less people will be fighting over each other to fill up your water.”
Featured Photo – Dreams Time
