Seattle $70K Minimum Wage Experiment Results: Good PR, Bad Business

That stiff price includes having difficulty making ends meet that he had his house rented out and losing some senior staff who felt cheated that they got a smaller increase compared to newer employees.

The owner of a Seattle company who announced that he would raise the minimum salary for his employees to ,000 a year is now struggling following to make ends meet.

Three months ago, a psychological study and a conversation with a friend inspired Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, to more than double the salaries of some of his employees in the name of fixing income inequality.

McMaster, 26, who has quit the company, said Price treated her as if she was being selfish when she told him of her concerns with the wage changes.

There were even customers who left because they saw it as a political move. “That really hurt me”.

Price himself took a pay cut from $1million to $70,000 to help fund the gesture, but will that be enough?

“I want to fight for the idea that if someone is intelligent, hard-working and does a good job, then they are entitled to live a middle-class lifestyle”, quotes the New York Times. This is going to make a huge difference to everyone around me.’.

The company has also lost customers, who were displeased with the decision.

“The people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me”, he told the paper.

“These individual acts can create a new kind of perception of what’s possible and what’s righteous”, Mr. Hanauer told the New York Times, giving the recent example of higher minimum wage laws, a trend which he said nobody anticipated.

Brian Canlis, co-owner of a family restaurant, already anxious about how to deal with Seattle’s new minimum wage, told Price the pay raise at Gravity “makes it harder for the rest of us”.

“There’s no flawless way to do this and no way to handle complex workplace issues that doesn’t have any downsides or trade-offs”, he said.

In a move which could cost the company thousands, Mr Price’s brother, Lucas Price, who owns 30 percent of the company, has filed a lawsuit against him.

Mr Price admits the company does not have a margin of error to allow for those legal fees.