An $18 minimum wage won’t raise prices dramatically

What kind of price increases would you be willing to shoulder to help alleviate poverty for tens of thousands of Hawaiʻi residents?

Hawaiʻi is incredibly expensive, so shouldering a huge price increase would likely be impossible for most of us—even if we wanted to. Fortunately for all of us, the price increases we would see as a result of raising the minimum wage to $18 by 2026—as proposed in Senate Bill 2018—are actually very small.

How about 31 cents? Would you be willing to spend that much more on a Zippy’s chili bowl, if it meant that 269,000 Hawaiʻi workers (roughly two out of every five), currently earning less than a living wage, would be able to move closer to self-sufficiency?

What about 45 cents more for a fast food combo? Or 29 cents more for a gallon of milk? A pound of bananas—just 5 cents more?

A comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed research on the subject shows that, for these small price increases, we could increase the state minimum wage by a whopping 78 percent, spread out over four years.

For low-income folks, those pennies can add up. But the pinch at the grocery store would be more than made up for by the wage increases they would see.

For price increases in the 1–3 percent range, we can provide more than $16,000 in additional annual wages to minimum wage workers. Even workers making $18 an hour today (still less than $38,000 annually) will see smaller, but not insignificant, wage increases that will go a long way toward providing financial stability.