And, finally, when pizza shop owners say they will buy labor-saving devices like automated kiosks to take orders, they forget that people have to design, make, install, and repair those devices and that jobs in those fields tend to pay better than jobs making and delivering pizza. Raising wages at the bottom pushes our whole economy into a faster, higher-wage path to growth.
We have great pizza in Pennsylvania. Contrary to the worries of the pizza shop owners who befriend legislators, a minimum wage that benefits Pennsylvania workers will benefit them as well. And fewer people will go without pizza.
Postscript: We did carry out the semi-serious research discussed above. But the Keystone Research Center did the real thing. They found that between 2012 and 2016 the minimum wage went up in the six states that surround us by an average of 12% after inflation, while it fell by 4.7% in Pennsylvania.
During that same period, real annual weekly wages in food service and drinking places went up by 7.8% in the other six states and only 5% in Pennsylvania. Employment in the same industry went up by 12.5% in our neighboring states and only 6.8% here.