Unexpectedly!

Seattle restaurants are going out of business following a big minimum wage hike? That’s weird. http://t.co/XmhnqhbM6T pic.twitter.com/DRZ2zDq0Vh

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) March 14, 2015

We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we?

‘Minimum wage hike killed my bookstore’ – Businesses in San Francisco must raise wages to at least $15 an hour ove… http://t.co/CUrba1jhIW

— A Consulting Team (@consulting_team) February 23, 2015

#RaiseTheWage can’t combat this. Automation will essentially force the low skilled workers out RT@ http://t.co/n5Zkr8C6G9 via @WSJ

— Ameshia Cross (@AmeshiaCross) October 24, 2014

As far as the automated dining service, Jazz Shaw writes, “It’s a terribly impersonal service as compared to a bartender or waitress who stops to chat with you, but it gets the job done:”

I ran into one of these setups at the Philadelphia airport this winter and they work surprisingly well. If you plan to pay by credit or debit card (which is the only option in some cases) you barely interact with a human at all. You browse the drinks and food on the touch screen, place your order, swipe your card, and a short while later somebody strolls up with your food and beverage, says hello and drops them off. It’s a terribly impersonal service as compared to a bartender or waitress who stops to chat with you, but it gets the job done.

Of course, that last phrase is the big issue here, isn’t it? It gets the job done. That job used to be done by a person. Now it’s essentially a robot. So those workers are no longer on the payroll, but hopefully they’ll catch on someplace else. Unfortunately, as Seattle is finding out, employers who run single outlets and don’t have the backing and buffer range of a major chain often won’t be able to make the shift in technological infrastructure required to cut back on staffing while staying open. Those folks will shut down, and it’s apparently already beginning in Washington state.

You know… if only somebody had tried to warn them.

Unexpectedly.

Update: Jonah Goldberg explored the racialist origins of the minimum wage in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism:

[Early “Progressive” stalwart Edward Alsworth Ross] was a showman, but his ideas fit squarely within the worldview of progressive economics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the “unemployable class.”It was Webb’s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables’worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of—you guessed it—social Darwinism. But for the progressives at the dawn of the fascist moment, this was an argument for it. “Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,”Webb observed, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.”30

Ross put it succinctly: “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.”Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man, the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn’t hire such miscreants in preference to “fitter”specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization.