Who decides what a worker's output is worth? The millionaire corporate CEO?

and Yes- if minimum wage increases and becomes the floor then to compete for workers companies then need to bid higher. Pretty simple economics don't you think?

There is NO evidence raising the minimum wage to $15/hour is inflationary. All sorts of recent activity in the economy the last decade were supposed to be inflationary yet .. we have almost NO inflation. You are looking at these issues again from an out-dated classical economics standpoint which, as Paul Krugman characterizes, is a zombie idea that keeps shambling on though dead.

Link #1

https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-testimony-feb-2019/

Link #1 debunks both the lost jobs assertion as well as the point I made about other wages rising to compete for labor.

It has been documented that restaurants etc which went out of business were typically marginal as a success anyway.

Yes some costs MAY, repeat MAY, get passed on to consumers, but absent collusion, that is not necessarily so. A McDonalds and Burger King sitting across from each other can either raise prices or not, depending on how they want to compete with each other. And the cost of increased wages doesn't make a burger jump significantly, the cost is spread out over volume at a small marginal amount.

By the way, companies are already using touch screens for ordering in fast food: Panera, McDonalds, etc regardless of minimum wage.

You cherry-picked some good propaganda with regards to Restaurants Unlimited. Of course they cite wages- easy scapegoat, right? But per Link #4 provided "It was sold to private-equity firm Sun Capital in 2007. According to legal filings, Restaurants Unlimited has more than $39 million in secured debt and another $7.6 million in unsecured debt to vendors. The company said it has just $150,000 in cash on hand and “lacks access to needed liquidity other than cash flow from operations.” However, as with Toys-R-Us and other companies bought by private equity companies, Sun Capital likely borrowed to purchase the chain, then piled that debt onto the restaurant company. I provide Link #3 below in this regard because Sun Capital did it to Shopko, a retail company! Sun also did this to Marsh Supermarkets. And Gordmans, and more. (BTW Also most of the restaurants in the chain ended up being bought by other restaurant companies).

Frankly I found out all this during a half hour while eating my lunch. I am surprised that you didn't research this a bit more thoroughly rather contort facts to fit an ideologically tainted argument.

What we have here is NOT a solid critique of raising the minimum wage but rather a prime example of predatory capitalism.

Link#2

https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/restaurants-unlimited-declares-bankruptcy

Link #3

https://wolfstreet.com/2019/01/17/another-retail-chain-owned-stripped-bare-by-sun-capital-goes-bankrupt/

We shouldn't keep the current minimum wage low merely to preserve current UN-livable wage payments. We should raise the minimum to a livable wage as it was always meant to be AND simultaneously commit to other forms of remediation for Americans who are out of work- a task this nation has notoriously been bad at precisely because it has operated under the lassiaz-faire focused model for far too long- a model which has widened the income gap, led to mass unemployment.