Five years from now, you might walk into a New York City restaurant and be directed to your seat by an AI “hostess.” After sitting down, you will be prompted to read the menu and order via a QR code. The only “service” you’ll get is when someone brings you your food.
What a lovely dining experience, yes? No friendly banter with the waitress. No questions about whether a specific wine would go well with beef or shellfish. No one to refill your water glass. The “experience” of going out on the town to eat would be far more sterile, more empty of the notion of “being served,” which is one of the reasons we eat out at $60-$100 a pop.
This is a scenario that may come to pass if the New York City Council passes the proposed $ 30-an-hour minimum wage. In addition, the plan calls for an end to the tipped wage credit, which would send a business owner’s labor costs soaring.
The tipped wage credit has been the norm for restaurants for 60 years. It allows wait staff to make upwards of $40 an hour. Most cities allow restaurant or bar owners to pay workers less than the minimum wage, thereby giving them a way to control labor costs.
“As much as I would like to pay $30, we don’t have money,” said Moe Chan, a coffee shop owner in Queens. That simple declaration could be repeated a thousand times across the five boroughs, as small coffee shops and restaurants, constantly operating on thin margins, face the full brunt of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ruinous socialist policies.
Mamdani’s “$30 by ’30” plan — a $30-an-hour minimum wage by 2030 — was one of the socialist’s most popular ideas among his economically illiterate supporters. “When working people have more money in their pocket, the overall economy thrives,” Mamdani said during the campaign. “Right now, if you are earning a minimum wage in the city, you simply cannot afford to continue calling it your home. We have to change that.”
The plan is currently being debated in the city council and is expected to pass with Mamdani’s blessing.
The idea isn’t new. Los Angeles implemented a limited version of the plan with a minimum wage increase to $30 for airport and hotel workers last year. Wages were to be increased incrementally until 2028.
“The Hotel Association of Los Angeles commissioned a study that found hotels have already eliminated or expect to eliminate roughly 6% of positions, approximately 650 jobs since the ordinance took effect in September,” reports MSN. It’s not just the job losses that are hurting the economy. Low-wage workers are finding that far fewer jobs are being created.
Reason.com reports, “An Oxford Economics analysis forecasted that L.A.’s hotel wage mandate would lead to a reduction of over 14,000 jobs in the city. L.A.’s gradual minimum wage hikes for hotels over the years—starting in 2015—have already led to notable reductions in employment.”
And there is a different kind of fallout as well. “Upward mobility” is dramatically affected.
Sean Hayden owns five restaurants in New York City and employs more than 200 people. He told the Wall Street Journal that a $30 minimum wage would make it effectively impossible for the next generation of culinary workers to do what he did — build toward ownership. “It’s just going to get to the stage where a chef or a waitress or a bartender who has a dream of opening a restaurant, it’s just not possible,” Hayden said. His concern is not abstract. He has already identified the specific operational response he would be forced to make.
If the mandate passes at $30 per hour, Hayden said he would lay off a “dozen” servers and replace table ordering with QR codes. The math behind that decision is straightforward: labor is the largest controllable cost in most restaurant operations, and when that cost increases by a mandated percentage, the first adjustment is headcount. QR code ordering systems are not new but deploying them as a direct response to a wage mandate carries a different meaning. “You’re taking the whole dining, hospitality aspect of it out,” Hayden said. The people most affected by that trade-off are the servers being replaced.
“Places will have to cut their staff in half and use QR codes on the table,” said Hayden, whose five restaurants are in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen district. “It’ll be like airport service.”
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t care if thousands of restaurants close as a result of his minimum wage scheme. The important thing is that those workers who are still employed will make $30 an hour. It’s a nice thing to remind voters of when he runs for re-election.
What New Yorkers are going to think about many restaurants shutting their doors because they can’t afford to stay open doesn’t concern him.
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