My wife works on a barely-above-minimum wage.

 A lot of debate around minimum wage ignore the other aspect of minimum-wage economy altogether: hours worked and hours commuted. Point is, businesses often respond to minimum wage increases by replacing full-time workers with part-time ones. Even worse, since businesses that employ minimum wage workers in the first place typically belong to the same industry, this means that entire industries reduce hours of their "least valued" employees, which means that in practice employees have to accept this new schedule, because they have no choice. And, yes, it often means worse service for customers - who also accept it because there is no choice.

 But even worse is the fact is that under this new minimum wage employees still need to commute the same amount of time, which creates a situation that for every paid hour you can spend another hour in a commute, which effectively halves your pay per hours spend on work. So everyone loses.

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