Cafe Adds 'Minimum Wage Fee' to Customers' Checks

As prices incrementally go up for products and services, it may not always be clear why. Indeed, some increases may go wholly unnoticed until presented in a comparison over several years.

One establishment in the picturesque Minnesota town of Stillwater decided to make a recent increase in their prices wholly transparent. As reported by City Pages, the Oasis Cafe has added a “minimum wage fee” to its customers’ checks to reflect and offset the increased cost of a newly implemented minimum wage law. Explaining the move on Facebook, the business writes:

WIth regards to why we’re charging a $.35 fee to cover the recent $.75 increase in in minimum wage…we estimate the increase in labor cost will will cost our company more than $10,000 per year…which has to be offset by an increase in revenue in order to operate profitably. Rather than increase the prices of our menu items, we chose to charge a flat fee. If the state of Minnesota would pass tip credit, like 43 other states have done, none of this would be necessary. For what it’s worth, we pay our people very well. Our dishwashers start at $10/hour, our cooks start at $12/hour and our servers average more than $20 when you consider what they earn in tips…

The explanation was offered in response to a critic on Facebook who claimed the move placed the business’s employees in a bad light. “Don’t you wonder how that makes your employees feel, making them look like the bad guys to their customers. Shame on you,” the critic wrote. How a customer would come to the conclusion that the minimum wage fee reflected in any way upon employees was not made clear.

Criticizing a business for effectively publicizing the effects of government (read: force) upon their operation is blaming the victim. Sympathy morally belongs with the business owner, whose capacity to act upon their own judgment and trade value for value honestly has been handicapped by government edict. If more businesses and organizations engaged in this kind of transactional activism, it might stimulate much needed debate on the morality of capitalism and the immorality of price controls.

(Today’s Fightin Words podcast is on this topic available here. 13:18 minutes long; 12.83 MB file size. Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Subscribe through iTunes or RSS feed.)