opebo was right about a $15/hour minimum wage

[Ban my account ffs!]

This thread is such a clueless Ivory Tower clusterInks. There is no unemployment, in the way the mmiddle class people think of unemployment, problem for minimum wage jobs. To the contrary, because the turnover at retail, food service, and child/eldercare facilities is so enormous, these places are always hiring. Always. And they will hire just about anybody. It's not that people cannot find jobs at all. It's that people decide, correctly or not, that minumum wage jobs are not worth the time and hassle. Raising the wage would almost certainly change that to say nthing of the increase in demand that higher wages inevitably bring. Get off your college campus and visit the Real World sometime, Atlas Forum.

If there's a shortage of workers for these positions, why aren't employers voluntarily raising their wages?

There is no shortage, but the jobs require very little skill or training, so it's cheaper for the employer to deal with the churn than to pay people more and have less turnover. My point, however, is that the turnover is so profound that everybody can catch a fish fairly quickly and easily even if there are technically more fishermen than fish. It's not that hard to understand, is hugely important to the low wage job market, and gets completely overlooked by AD's oversimplistic Econ 101 graph. The world is a lot more complicated than college makes it seem.

I don't think I understand your metaphor. How would you expect an increase the minimum wage to affect low-wage employment?

It would reduce the velocity of turnover.  People would remain at the job longer.  This would increase skills and drive wages higher.