Bummer. The last few "old guard" businesses downtown will probably be replaced with much more expensive places sooner than they would have. Queen House might turn into another Eureka. Not that anything is wrong with Eureka, but it's getting hard to find lunch for less than $25 downtown. In the end, we all pay for the minimum wage via the prices of our goods and services.

The City Council doesn’t care about the small business owner. McAlister is the only one looking out for them.

@ Resident is right-on. Remember how going out to lunch used to be a $10 thing and is now $15 - well, plan on it now being $15.65. No, not those exact numbers, but about the right proportions.
At least in Berkeley where this was done, they created a policy that since employees were being paid a better wage, a TIP was truly optional, like how it is in Europe.

Socialist activist Lenny Siegel says "wage theft"? Sounds like an inflammatory union diatribe straight out of the union wars of the '30s. Fortunately, he'll be gone, and not too soon, back to somewhere like Berkeley hopefully.

This would have been the wrong thing to do.b the policy is set and it would have hurt people who are planning on the extra money and must committee to MV to cater to the rich.

McAllister is just showing his greed again. I'm sure he wants to pay his ice-cream shop workers the minimum he can and then charge them the most he can for their rents. He and Chris Clarke do not represent good business tactics or what mountain view workers deserve. I can't wait to kick the rest of these council members out. Be the really bad ones are still there.

[Post removed due to disrespectful comment or offensive language]

So this isn't the hill Chris Clark wants to die on? Good to know that he doesn't have the backbone to stand up to the SJW bullies on the city council. We will all pay for their "good intentions" because nobody is willing to stand up what makes sense. It does make voting easier next time though.

As you can tell from Lenny Siegel's inflammatory comments, bringing MV in line with other cities doesn't matter to him. He just wants to bring the hammer down on businesses and drive anyone small out of town. Too bad he failed Econ 101 and thinks what he wants trumps what the market will bear. Businesses will leave, then he will call the owners greedy and selfish because they have to earn enough to eat and live indoors.

I suggest that the last motion Lenny Siegel makes before he leaves office to rename the city. We can call it South Seattle because his short-sighted behavior will end up driving businesses out of town, if not out of business completely. I, for one, will not pay huge amounts to buy a hamburger, lunch or anything else and those people he thinks he's helping will be out of a job. Maybe Siegel has enough money to hand people a salary higher than their skills warrant, but not everyone can. Maybe he'd like to label them as greedy and selfish too.

I don't spend much in MV as it is. I will now be spending less. It is worth a drive to another town to avoid supporting such foolishness.

I like listening to PSR becasue he/she makes so much "sense".

It is good to see at least someone admitting their intent to make life miserable for anyone else other than themselves.

Imagine any business going out of business becasue of a 65 cent increase in hourly pay. It would appear that they are just hanging on by a thread.

Most businesses paying minimum wage do so in order to maximize profits. Just imagine the "real" return on investment they get from understaffed businesses expecting 3 time the productivity of a single worker. This is in fact the reality.

Fast food chains are putting up touch screens to eliminate cashiers. Smart phone apps are destroying custoer service workers. I am a great fan of I.T., but we are stepping off the cliff regarding the balance between the advantages of it versus the social destruction. The market cannot tolerate nothing but the loswest costs and the highest returns.

Thus there will be no balancing of the expectations of worker productivity and wage growth as proven in the last 30 years. Productivitiy is so high that one worker can easily do the work of 5 now, but their wages have declined with regards to the cost of living.

And by the way, the unemployment rate is so low becasue the baby boomers have retired. The worker to retired ratio is now about 2 people retired to one active worker. This is not a sign of good economics, it is a sign of economic disaster just coming around the corner.

NO ONE IN THE BUSINESS MARKET WILL DISCUSS THE REAL PICTURE BECASUE THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO SO. THEY DEPEND ON THE ILLUSION OF A GOOD ECONOMIC FUTURE SO THEY CANNOT ACCEPT THE UPCOMING PROBLEMS AND WILL NOT DO SO. CNBC IS NOTORIOUS EVEN IN THE BAD MARKET NEWS TO FIND ANY GOOD NEWS AND FINANCIAL SALESMAN TO PAINT A GOOD PICTURE, THE HISTORY GOES REGARDING THE TITANIC "AND THE BAND PLAYED ON"

[Post removed due to poster being banned for repeated violations of terms of use]

Minimum wage in Mountain View should have been raised along time ago. As cost of living goes up so should minimum wage. The demand for housing in Mountain View is very high. So it makes sense to raise the minimum wages of the service employees work in the community in order for them to afford housing close to work. That's only fair since that is what is being done for all of the Google employees. The city of Mountain View bends over backwards for the tech employees by approving all of the new development to house them. So to not give the rest of the community a fair chance at housing by raising minimum wage wouldn't be right.