Cost of living is no justification for raising the wage floor, let alone having one in the first place. If we could universalize a standard of living with a wage floor, just set it at $50 an hour and let everybody own a nice home and a few new cars in their lifetime. The problem is that we can't change the laws of supply and demand with a flick of the legislative wand. Labor has a price that is set by the market, and that price (like all prices) is just a piece of information. It tells us what the labor is worth relative to everything else in the market. If an apple costs me $1 and I earn $10 an hour, then that apple is worth 1/10th of an hour of my labor. If a coconut costs $2, it's worth 1/5th of an hour of my labor. It's mighty inconvenient to have price tags that relate the price of produce to every conceivable item or service on the market, though, and it's not very convenient for me to have to work a few minutes for a farmer in return for his apple, or to have to work a shift or so for my dentist in return for an appointment. So we have currency instead. It translates the hypothetical barter-system price tag into a readable slip of paper, and it allows me to represent my earned wealth to all sorts of vendors, which means I can earn money by making chairs in a factory and then buy oranges from a farmer [i]without actually building chairs for the farmer himself.[/i] If we raised the minimum wage to $20 an hour, a worker previously working for $10 an hour doesn't magically become twice as valuable. His labor is still worth the same relative to everything else on the market, except for the dollar. His labor is now worth twice as much money, but not twice as much wealth. This just means that the price for an apple goes up by another dollar. The coconut becomes $4, and so on and so forth. We look at all this and then we wonder why places with outrageous wage floors have such high costs of living.

I never said I wanted $15 I want $30

Yeah, you tell 'em! Now tell the rust belt that robots and clean energy are putting them out of work and that they need to actually learn new skills, or end up making minimum wage like the very people they sneer at!

Just build Skynet and get it over with, people...

Can we as humans just stop being so f[b]u[/b]cking stupid and put the '$' before the amount of money? $15 not 15$

YOURE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO LIVE OFF OF MINIMUM WAGE HOLY SHIT BUCKET PEOPLE. ITS FOR HIGH SCHOOL KIDS TO BE ABLE TO GO ON DATES. Sorry for yelling I just can't stand stupidity.

Raising the minimum wage leads to everything else being raised in cost. [spoiler]as if $3 per gallon gas wasn't bad enough...[/spoiler]

Here is one argument. Most Walmart workers get paid a low wage and end up on some sort of welfare. They use the welfare money to buy essentials needed to live. Typically that Walmart worker will spend that money at Walmart. So in essence Walmart is a state funded business whose owners reap all the rewards.

Legitimately, I think the $15 figure was mostly highballing for the sake of negotiation. But the automation isn't a direct result of that, so much as it is accurate and accessible. Humans mishear things (for example my "father" never got the right order because he basically mumbled), and aren't omniglots. A computer has exact input, and can easily be given a vast amount of language options, depending on area demographics.

Way I see it, if we increase minimum wage the prices will just go up accordingly, though I'm not an economist so I couldn't say for sure

Though I'm certainly not advocating a $15 minimum wage, I still think you're attributing the wrong reason to the linked story. Minimum wage hikes are, at most, slightly speeding up a process that was well on it's way to begin with. While at the same time providing a nice excuse for these companies to usher in the plans they already had to begin with. Notice how everyone points to minimum wage hikes when discussing things like fast food kiosks? Notice how all the blame is placed on the wage and not the company itself? Convenient, huh? Automation is coming, folks. It's coming in ways you may not even realize yet. And yes.. a whole hell of a lot of jobs are going to be lost. But that was already decided the moment companies realized that technology has reached a point of reliability and cost that a worker at damn near any wage will still be more expensive than automation. It was an inevitability the moment technology was created. Now we just need to stop bickering over what "caused" it and figure out what to do about it.

I agree. I've been working for a company for over 6 years still ain't making $13/hr and it's crazy expensive here in Massachusetts to live. Even getting a studio is $1200+ not including electricity even sometimes not including heat plus got your food, internet/cable, phone bill and car insurance to take care of. And what am I making barley $800 every 2 weeks..

To all you people wanting a job as an office worker/accountant/manufacturer, you will be replaced by robots in at most 25 years. We must put more value in the service, creative design, computer science, and healthcare industries instead of focusing on manufacturing and generic businesses.

Stop raising minimum wage. Lower the cost of living or freeze the cost of living so that minimum wage actually does something besides raising prices 6 months before the raises go into effect. Why does no one see this? We raise minimum wage & 6 months before it goes into effect, BAM!!, your pizza rolls just shot up to $2.50 a bag!

Employers will pay what you're worth plus however good you are at negotiating.

How about getting rid of the minimum wage?

You're a -blam!-ing idiot. Fast food chains were moving towards automation because of efficiency, not because they couldn't afford it. COSTCO pays their average employee around $17 per hour. So don't tell me Walmart (a much more profitable business) can't do that too.

The selective bitching from whiny conservative snowflakes is ridiculous. You will always hear them cry about "burger flippers" at McDonalds making $15 per hour, but they have nothing to say about Ben N Jerry's ice cream scoopers earning $16 per hour starting, or In N Out "burger flippers" earning $13-$14 per hour starting, or cashiers at COSTCO making $16 per hour starting with continuous raises. I think rightists are just whiny little SJWs so miserable they worry about other people's salaries instead of their own. Why not any outrage for the CEO of Walmart earning $9,323 an hour? And you're bitching about a mere $15? Holy shit, your brain must be -blam!-ed up.