What's irksome about it? It's an indicator that inflation/prices have outpaced wages. Should we no longer be concerned with livability? Only with returns on capital?
The response is in context of someone complaining they cannot afford something.
If I am complaining that I cannot afford a private chef in my home, then the answer is for me to figure out how to earn more. Or go without a chef.
It is the same thing for a restaurant. Either figure out how to make more money (even if it means closing the business and changing your line of work, or figure out how make do without the chef).
Especially considering this was caused by the government passing out money for too long in addition to telling everyone to not bother paying their rent. Plenty of places have been offering $15-$20/hour and have struggled to find help since why would you work when unemployment pays more?
A lot of people used the time they were involuntarily let go to up-skill into better-paying careers. This resulted in a labor shortage in minimum-wage jobs, regardless of unemployment benefits (that have since lapsed in a chunk of states). Market forces are at play here, there's no reason to special-case labor when small businesses can handle increases in the other costs (gas, lumber, aluminum, steel, etc), the only reason I can think of is because they think they can bully the suppliers (of labor), or lobby the government to do that on their behalf.
Why not? Being short staff implies there is more business than the current staff can handle. There are tech startups (aka small businesses) that would kill for that problem.
The feedback mechanism for identifying errors is failure as is the incentive to correct them. Otherwise, we end up in a privatize the profits, socialize the risks situation. As we currently are.
For example, I bid for land for commercial real estate. I have been outbid by another developer who assumes they can pay more for the land because their labor costs will be lower for the business. They want to bet they can get away with paying bottom tier wages, whereas I want to pay higher wages. Or have more redundancies or use higher quality materials. Of course, the land gets sold to them at the higher price, they get to build the business.
Why should they get bailed out? They wanted to take on more risk, in the form of not allow much wiggle room for labor costs or using subpar materials. That is their fault, and society benefits from the market sending a signal from that developers failure to better allocate resources.
>If we were talking about a tech company, would you feel the same way?
How can you possibly be confident in what it means for a business to deserve to exist? If they're not doing anything illegal and they're not losing money they deserve to exist, beyond that there's no way to say.
Laws don’t dictate our collective ethical code fully. They are more like minimum requirements for the state to maintain order, with some hard won ethical mandates thrown in. It’s easy to justify that statement on ethical grounds IMO
High wage countries don't seem to have a shortage of places to eat. if competitors are subject to the same labor market, all prices should go up together which would not give you a competitive disadvantage. certainly a lesser disadvantage than not being able to open because you are unwilling to pay the market labour rate.
That's a textbook example of price elasticity from economics 101. You can also think about it this way: if that weren't the case, they would have already raised their prices even before there was a labor shortage.
> all prices should go up together which would not give you a competitive disadvantage
Not a competitive disadvantage, but still a disadvantage. Take restaurants for example. If every restaurant in the world raised all of their prices by the exact same amount at the exact same time, they wouldn't lose any business to each other, but they'd still lose a bunch of business to people eating at home.
