Big companies like McDonald's and Walmart have raised their minimum wages recently, but it's nothing like what CEO Dan Price is doing at Gravity Payments. The 30-year-old, who said he wants to confront income inequality in America, has slashed his own salary and raised the minimum salary at his company to $70,000. 
 
 But not everyone in corporate America can afford to make such drastic changes so quickly, especially companies with large numbers of minimum wage workers. 
 
 "It just doesn't make economic sense for really large companies that have a lot of people like that to give huge raises like this. It can tip them from being profitable to being unprofitable, which is why we're not going to see a huge stampede of companies doing this," labor economist Alec Levenson said. 
 
 "It's not about pay, it's about an opportunity and developing people and giving them a chance to like thrive and show what they can do," Price said. 
 
 Price admits the salary increases will cut his credit card processing company's profits in half in the near term. But having happier, more productive employees he believes will pay off in the long term. 
 
 Price made the announcement at his company's quarterly meeting. The minimum salary at the company will immediately jump to at least $50,000 and rise to $70,000 within three years. 
 
 "I realized that people who are making less than that, there is an emotional cost that they have every single day. And you only get to live once, and so those are days that are lost in terms of really getting to live a full life. And so getting them there was really based on that research that Princeton did in 2010," Price said. 
 
 That Princeton study concluded that emotional well-being rises as one's income rises, up to about $75,000 dollars a year. 
 
 The reaction of his 120-employees went from subdued shock to a standing ovation. 
 
 Alyssia O'Neal is a 21-year-old single mother who works in customer service. 
 
 "I do pay for daycare out of pocket," O'Neal said. 
 
 Overnight, her annual salary jumped from $37,000 to $50,000 dollars. 
 
 "It just gives you a little bit more confidence to go about your day and not having to worry about going paycheck to paycheck," O'Neal said. 
 
 "Maybe I cried when I called my mom," 29-year-old supervisor Jose Garcia said with a chuckle. 
 
 Garcia has $54,000 in student debt. Now those loans will be easier to pay off. 
 
 "I think it's life-changing for everybody in various ways," Garcia said. 
 
 It's potentially life-changing for Price as well. 
 
 "So I'm reducing my salary from a million dollars a year to about $70,000," Price said. 
 
 He'd like to see other companies follow his lead, but that's not why he did it. 
 
 "I want to be a part of the solution to inequality in this country, and so if corporate America also wants to be a part of that solution, that would make me really happy," Price said. 
 
 Word is getting around, and Gravity Payments received more than 500 new resumes on Tuesday. ||||| Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, has touched off a national debate over his plan to pay all of his workers a yearly salary of at least $70,000. But where did that figure come from and what's behind it? 
 
 The number, the CEO said, comes from a 2010 Princeton University study by economist Angus Deaton and Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, the researchers analyzed the answers to questions about income and well-being from more than 450,000 Americans polled by Gallup and Healthways. 
 
 Money does indeed buy happiness but only up to a point, the researchers found. The less someone made below $75,000, the unhappier they reported feeling. But making above that income threshold did not lead to increasing happiness. 
 
 It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, said study author Kahneman, who is now retired. As he explained it, there are two types of happiness: day-to-day mood and long-term well-being. 
 
 “Making a higher income doesn’t appear to affect your daily happiness after a point but making more and more money does continue to improve your outlook on life indefinitely,” he explained. 
 
 In other words, an annual paycheck higher than $70,000 won’t leave you feeling any less grumpy on a daily basis, but the larger your salary, the more successful and secure you feel. 
 
 Their research did not detect the limit where burgeoning wages stopped providing a sense of satisfaction, Kahneman said. Additionally, the same percent increase in pay -- whether you make a lot or a little -- added to a greater sense of satisfaction with life. 
 
 Their study didn’t reveal why $70,000 to $75,000 a year appeared to be the cut off for escalating happiness, Kahneman said, adding he had no clue why that was the magic number. The number probably only applies to large, expensive cities and not places where the cost of living is cheaper, he said. 
 
 The number should be revisited from time to time to adjust for inflation, he said. And the link between money and happiness should probably be interpreted as having less money leading to misery rather than more money bringing joy. 
 
 Kahneman also said he really can’t comment on Price’s grand experiment which calls for everyone in the 120 person credit card payment company to earn a minimum of $70,000 by December, 2017. However, he doubted the CEO’s gesture will catch on in a big way. 
 
 “It’s not viable for every company,” he said “There is not a general lesson to be learned from this case.”
– Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price has been lauded since news broke that he's gradually raising the minimum salary for his company's employees to $70,000—but what will it be like for Price to live on $70,000? That's what he, too, will be making, down from about $1 million a year, until the company's profits surpass the level they were at last year, before the raises went into effect. "I haven't even thought about that at all, too much," he tells ABC News. "My life started pretty simple, in a lot of ways. I don't have a lot of financial obligations or debts." He owns a "nice" three-bedroom home and has been driving his Audi for 12 years. "I may have to scale back a little bit, but nothing I'm not willing to do," the 30-year-old says. "I'm single. I just have a dog." Not that he doesn't enjoy the finer things in life: He has lots of rich friends, and he often gets invited onto their yachts or private planes, he says: "I have an incredibly luxurious life, for some reason, but I don't end up paying for a lot of it." He adds that he wasn't making $1 million "because I need that much to live, but that's what it would cost to replace me as a CEO." And that in itself is a problem, he notes: "I think CEO pay is way out of whack. ... I'm a big believer in less: The more you have, sometimes the more complicated your life gets." But will Price's move become a trend? Likely not, experts tell MainStreet, ABC News, and CBS News. "It just doesn't make economic sense for really large companies that have a lot of people like that to give huge raises like this," explains a labor economist. "It can tip them from being profitable to being unprofitable."