A local bookstore in Sacramento is shutting down. It isn’t closing its doors because people aren’t reading anymore or they’re strictly shopping on Amazon. Instead, it’s because of California’s new $15 minimum wage law.
That’s right. For those who don’t think the minimum wage shuts down businesses and cuts jobs then here is another real-world example of a small business ending operations.
Reportedly, the brick-and-mortar bookstore, called The Almost Perfect Bookstore, will close on July 27. This means that six people will lose their jobs. Moving forward, it will transition into an online bookstore.
Although rent was a factor, Scott Singley, assistant manager of The Almost Perfect Bookstore blamed the rising minimum wage as the primary reason.
California Governor Jerry Brown, who admitted that the minimum wage doesn’t make economic sense, signed the state’s new $15 minimum wage this past spring. It will gradually increase from the current $10 per hour to $15 per hour by the year 2022.
As free market economist Thomas Sowell refers to it, the minimum wage is “ruinous compassion.”
“It is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum-wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the most diverse countries,” Sowell wrote.
“This is just one of many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.”
It’s time to abolish the minimum wage.
Another B.S. article about the minimum wage. If it is not going to be $15 per hour until 2022, how can they blame the store closing in 2016. Rent was sighted as a major cause, not the $15 minimum wage. I made $9.10 per hour loading trucks, for Gallo Wine in Commerce, CA in 1975. So, do not try and tell me higher wages cannot be paid to the worker. Almost everyone saying they cannot pay a higher minimum wage are already making more than $15 per hour, go figure.