Lemme do some quick back of the envelope math about wages.

On a busy day at the pizza place, we'd have the following crew:

Drivers: $2/hr Tip Wage - 44 man-hours
Insiders: $8/hr - 20 man-hours
Managers: $12/hr - 22 man-hours

For a total of ~$512. Aiming for ~15-20% of sales. /

That works out to ~17% on a ~$3000 night, so that's bang-on target.

Let's say we raised everybody there to a $15/hr wage.

We'd end up adding $778 to labor for the day.

More than doubling! That sure sounds like a lot!

But hang on a second.

Let's assume for easy math that what we're selling is $10 one-topping large pizzas.

For 3k, we're selling 300. We've got to divide up that 778 between the pizzas.

That raises the price of each pizza from $10 to $12.59.

"That's... well, not huge, but it's still more money!"

Definitely! But, here's something important.

The price of a pizza has actually gone down.

Remember, money isn't real! It's a representation of the time worked.

The vast majority of the people we had been selling that pizza to weren't making $15 an hour before. We were in a college town, that manager wage of $12/hour was a /good/ wage. WE were buying that pizza.