Sorry for any confusion. I don't consider McDonald's a tipped server. I'm talking about restaurant workers whose hourly wage without tips is below minimum wage.

Oh I also don’t consider McDonald’s workers a tipped server. But that doesn’t matter. The law is if they are tipped more than $30 a MONTH in tips. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/15-tipped-employees-flsa

That means if they get a single dollar a day in tips they legally classify as a tipped employee. So all these restaurants putting a tip option on their checkouts are fundamentally forcing their employees into a tipped role. Even if they only get $30 a month in tips.

But that wasn’t why I used McDonald’s as an example. I used it as an example because McDonald’s is everywhere. It’s in tiny countryside towns, other countries, etc. So those small businesses operating on thin margins were already competing with employers paying much more than minimum wage.

Fair enough on raising prices, but with chains I was thinking less about the increase coming from paying employees and more from "look, people will pay more!"

McDonald’s didn’t raise prices when minimum wage went up in a number of states, because it was already paying more. But in some places it wasn’t, and the prices of food didn’t go up even with a minimum wage increase, because the price of food is the overwhelmingly most expensive part of a restaurant. When McDonald’s prices did go up was when tariffs hit, when food gets diseased, etc.

I use McDonald’s as as example for all this because it’s a lot easier to see the effects of federal policy when you can compare against every single state.

Increased prices and closing of some small businesses seems inevitable no matter how you go about it, but we can't just rely on restaurants paying servers up to $7.25 an hour and expecting them to survive. It's a massive change and needs to come from the top down. And I can't see that happening.

Those restaurants have to pay that amount no matter what. Either it’s a hidden cost for the customers, or if the customers don’t tip enough they have to pay up to minimum wage for that state. So small business in California for example, already have to pay $16.90 an hour, if a server doesn’t make $16.90 an hour from the tipped minimum wage plus their tips. The costs are just hidden from consumers.