Watch The Pho: Seattle's Minimum Wage Hike And The Effect On Cheap Eats And Cheap Eateries
Thanh Tan writes in the Seattle Times that to see the effects of the minimum wage hike there in the coming months, follow the pho -- the noodle soup meal that is "Vietnam's most popular comfort food":

Some restaurants might respond by adding service fees and increasing menu prices. Ivar's recently announced plans to end tipping and pay all employees $15 an hour.

A seafood mainstay can do that. Pho is different. It exists to be large, tasty and cheap.

Quynh-Vy Pham's family owns four Pho Bac restaurants in the city. Her parents opened the original shop at the corner of South Jackson Street and Rainier Avenue South in 1982.

Pham says they will hold on to current prices -- $7.75 for a small bowl, according to the restaurant's website -- as long as possible. Like so many others pho proprietors, their restaurant is not designed to be an Ethan Stowell or Tom Douglas establishment where customers expect to pay premium prices.

"It's hard for people to pay $15 for a 'to pho,' " Pham says, referring to the Vietnamese translation of a bowl of soup. "The culture of Vietnamese restaurants means we have to be price aggressive."

...Taylor Hoang, owner of five Pho Cyclo Cafe restaurants, says the [ethnic business owners'] coalition requested a training wage or an exemption for microbusinesses with fewer than 10 employees.

They got nothing.

Anxiety is widespread, Hoang says, because the city is still releasing and translating information for non-English-speaking communities. For her, increasing the price on a product like pho is harder than it seems.

"Pho is not categorized as fine dining. People who eat this type of food have a certain expectation in their mind, so they are very price sensitive," she warns. " If they have to pay more than $10 plus gratuity and tax, it's no longer an affordable luxury for customers who are used to eating with us a few times a week."

To reduce expenses, Hoang is considering making their meatballs in-house using machinery rather than the handcrafted meatballs they commission from a local producer. Same goes for the tofu and hand-sliced rare steak.

"There are different ways we can cut our costs. At the same time, that's going to trickle down to supporting businesses," she says.

A review of "burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s" by UC econ prof David Neumark and Fed Reserve deputy director of research and stats William Wascher:

A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.

And from page 3 of a paper published at Alec.org, a problem commenters here have mentioned before -- minimum wage jobs were never intended to be a way to support a family for life but a way into the working economy.

Misconception: Minimum wage earners are trapped in poverty.

TRUTH: Minimum wage jobs are viewed by many as the first step in a long career path. Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners gain pay raises within the first year of employ- ment.viii From 1981 to 2004, the median annual growth in wages for minimum wage employ- ees was nearly six times that of employees earning more than the minimum wage.

Women who have children out of wedlock with little means of supporting them bring those children up in poverty and tend to funnel those children into the go-nowhere jobs. That, however, is not addressed by, say, black leaders like Jesse Jackson, despite a reported 70-some percent of black women bringing children into the world as single mothers, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

via @Mark_J_Perry