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California’s recent legislation has also spurred alarm among other food sectors excluded from the new minimum wage standard, notably the state’s school food service industry. California employs more fast food workers than any other state in the country, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, followed by Texas, Florida and New York. California now offers fast food workers the highest guaranteed base salary in the industry; for all other workers, it also offers one of the highest minimum wages in the country, at $16 per hour. Democrats in the California State Legislature passed Assembly Bill 1228 last year, increasing the minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers from $16 to $20 an hour to help them cope with the rising cost of living.
Fast service,
One Pizza Hut franchisee cited the wage hike as the reason for a preemptive wave of layoffs, in which more than 1,000 delivery drivers will be cut this year across the state. Yard House is known for great food, classic rock music and 160 taps of domestic, local and import beers. Whether you're in the mood for a grilled burger and a pint of our favorite beer or Poke Bowl paired with the Magic Margarita, Yard House has something for everyone. It's the perfect place to unwind and take a break - meet old friends for happy hour, celebrate a special occasion, or gather your family for dinner. California's new law applies to chains with at least 60 "limited-service" locations in the US — that is, restaurants where customers order and pay for their food before getting it instead of sitting down and being waited on. But restaurant owners, eager to protect profits, have raised the menu prices that consumers pay to help offset the cost.
How California fares in 20 national rankings, from housing to crypto to wellness
There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. March saw 1,186 new homes purchased across Southern California – flat in a year. New home sales were just 8.4% of all March sales, the smallest share for local builders since last August. All-time high prices also were set in Orange, Riverside, and San Diego counties.
Southern California home price hits record $753,000 as sales drop
Many fast food workers in California have been taking home more money since April 1, when the state's minimum wage for those workers went to $20 an hour. Chipotle told investors last week that prices at nearly 500 of its California chains increased between 6% and 7% across its menu during the first week of April, compared to the same time last year. At California Chick-fil-A locations, prices have increased by over 10% on average since the start of April, according to research by Gordon Haskett Research Advisors.
Fast food already had an affordability problem, Business Insider reported last year. Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell and Shake Shack did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment. We'll include the restaurant's address, phone number and a link to this page. With over 100 drafts on tap, every visit to our house is a chance to experience something new, or enjoy your favorite. If you have a specific request about your order, please give us a call.
But better pay is also part of a problem, since businesses need to front higher labor costs on top of rising food prices—and are now shifting that cost onto consumers through price hikes. Those lofty prices and rates translated to a typical $3,935 monthly house payment — the fifth-highest on record — for a March buyer in Southern California, assuming buying the median-priced home with a 20% downpayment. That’s an 11% jump in a year, a steep expense when one measure of local wages – the Employment Cost Index – rose just 5% last year.
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Another homebuying challenge was that the few Southern California house hunters who could afford to buy were forced to battle over limited options. These same affordability challenges kept many owners from placing homes on the market because they feared they could not afford a new residence. The increased mortgage rates were an unexpected uptick for many analysts, many of whom predicted rates would be declining by now.
Rates as measured by a 30-year loan benchmark from Freddie Mac averaged 6.82% in March, up from 6.64% in January and 6.54% a year ago. The six-county region had 14,176 completed sales in March of existing and new houses, townhomes, and condos, according to data released by CoreLogic on Monday, April 29. This was off 8% from a year ago and represents the second-lowest sales for a March in Southern California since 1988. Only March 2008, amid a global financial collapse, had fewer sales.
Happy hour food,
Often, fast-food joints are operated by franchisees — business owners who run a small group of stores and pay a company like McDonald's for the right to do so. That means that individual franchisees may choose to pass on the higher pay costs, while others don't. That same listings data offered a big hint as to why sluggish homebuying won’t pick up soon. Southern California had 15,200 pending sales in March – that’s residences with a signed purchase contract – up only 3% in a year.
Lynsi Snyder, the president and third-generation owner of In-N-Out, told NBC's "Today" earlier this month that she pushed to limit menu price increases in response to both higher wages as well as general inflation. In addition to higher menu prices, the law has also led to some job cuts in the industry. Even though McDonald’s executives had warned that it, too, would increase menu prices because of the wage increase, KER found that it has not done so yet. Chipotle raised the price of its Chicken Burrito by 8.3% and the Steak Burrito by 7%, while Burger King increased the price of its Whopper Meal by an average of 1.4%, according to KER. Kalinowski Equity Research compared prices at 25 restaurants for each chain and also did a side-by-side comparison of specific menu items before and after the wage hike. Wendy’s has hiked prices by roughly 8% while Chipotle has raised prices by 7.5%, according to data from Kalinowski Equity Research and cited in The New York Post.
The law was also seen as an acknowledgment that many of the more than 500,000 Californians who work in fast food are not teenagers earning some spending money but adults working to support their families. Indeed, some restaurant operators say that they've already raised prices more than usual over the last year or two in response to inflation and are worried that another round of increases would scare off customers. One Burger franchisee told BI that he's instead installing ordering kiosks at his restaurants to save money on wages. This year, 22 states have raised their minimum wage, affecting nearly 10 million workers.
To be sure, for many minimum wage workers, the pay raises are needed. According to Gordon Haskett’s data, prices at many popular chains in California rose from mid-February to mid-April. Prices at Starbucks, Shake Shack, Chipotle and Taco Bell all jumped by roughly 5% in those two months, while restaurant prices nationwide rose just 0.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Lethargic homebuying, however, didn’t stop the six-county region’s median sales price from reaching a new peak. Prices rose 1.8% in March – and 8% in a year – to a record-high $753,000, besting the old April 2022 record by $3,000.
The year had started with industry hopes there would be a significant homebuying reversal from the previous two years, which were the slowest for Southern California home sales in a database that dates back 36 years. "I was sitting in VP meetings going toe-to-toe, saying, 'We can't raise the prices that much, we can't,'" she told "Today." "When everyone else was taking jumps, we weren't." With a higher minimum wage, government spending on low-income worker benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and spending on earned income tax credit and child tax credits could drop by billions, according to EPI.
Last year, Sacramento Unified School District increased wages for its food service workers by 10%, hiking another 6% in July to bring workers to $20 per hour. According to an AP report, it was the district’s largest single raise in nearly three decades. A district official told the AP food-service workers could earn up to $25.51 per hour, but would only work three hours per day and be ineligible for health benefits. Some fast food restaurant chains have raised menu prices by as much as 8% since California’s $20 an hour minimum wage law took effect April 1, according to a new report.
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