Albuquerque’s painfully-high minimum wage

In listings of highest city-level minimum wages, Albuquerque rarely makes the list of those having the rates. However, as we all know, living in Albuquerque isn’t as expensive as living in San Francisco. So, a website called SmartAsset did the cost of living calculations for major cities with their own minimum wages and found Albuquerque to have the 5th-highest in the nation.

You can see the top-10 cities by “real” minimum wages below:

Shockingly enough, despite (or perhaps because of) the cities high minimum wage, Albuquerque is not exactly booming as the liberal Brookings Institute has pointed out.

Interestingly, and further buttressing the case against government-mandated minimum wages, a new report out of Seattle relating to that City’s $11/hour minimum wage indicates that the usually fast-growing restaurant industry lost jobs concurrently with the increase in the minimum wage.

In a separate article, Wendy’s CEO Emil Brolick, when asked how the franchisees who own and operate Wendy’s locations could raise prices to offset the higher wage costs in places like New York. He replied that “our franchisees will likely look at the opportunity to reduce overall staff, look at the opportunity to certainly reduce hours and any other cost reduction opportunities, not just price. You know there are some people out there who naively say that these wages can simply be passed along in terms of price increases. I don’t think that the average franchisee believes that.”