California residents: How much more expensive have things gotten for you since the minimum wage was raised two weeks ago?
Not relevant for this answer: Philosophical treatises on minimum wages, macroeconomics, justice, racism, socialism. Simply not useful.
If you’re living in California, where the minimum wage was raised to $20 on April 1 -
What have you noticed?
Has it changed your buying habits?
Are things tangibly more expensive for you? How are you coping? (if it’s a problem)
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13 Answers
Haven’t noticed it, an I am famously cheap.
No notable rise in prices this month, just a general inflationary trend that began during the pandemic and shows no signs of letting up. I remember when a bag of groceries didn’t cost $70…
^^I feel like fast food everywhere has gotten ridiculously expensive, although not as much as that article talks about. I see it as a win-win situation though because I need to eat less fast food in my life and the rising prices are helping with that.
I haven’t seen much of it within my usual shopping circuit, but I don’t have much to do with restaurants and fast food places.
What I have seen is some local news stories of businesses, especially small restaurants, that have closed or are about to close because they can’t meet the new requirement.
I have not seen any increase in prices, just an increase in poorly written news articles.
Fast food is overpriced everywhere. Chain restaurants here used the worker shortage as an excuse to hire less and give less service. Truth came out that there was no actual shortage of qualified applicants. Then they blamed inflation for high prices but it was a strategic price hike.
This will be yet another excuse to hike prices.
Well 2 weeks isn’t really enough time to do the books to see the impact.
I don’t live in California but I feel they knew it was coming and were already raising prices before the pay raise took effect so they could say, they didn’t purposely raise prices because of wages. I know in my state, fast food has gotten ridiculously expensive. However, my nephew is really smart at only buying at fastfood chains that have sales going on. He recently got two quarter pounders and fries and a drink and chicken nuggets for under 10 bucks. Though I don’t know if it was a special for students. Just looked up on a MacDonalds app that you can get two big macs for the price of one and Fridays is free fries at my local MacDonalds.
Ordering from the app is definitely the way to go. The prices are way more reasonable and they have specials that you can take advantage of. Plus I like the idea of pulling into a space and having them bring your order out to you as opposed to waiting in a ridiculous drive-thru line. Not that I eat there that much anymore and certainly not well I’m confined to my house.
So it seems the so called “ inflation” and minimum wage increase was just an excuse to push higher prices. In the last two weeks, all the major fast food chains have been running cheap combo meal deals at prices lower than when the higher minimum wage went into effect.
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