Cambridge Restaurant Owner Raises Prices To Pay Workers More
CAMBRIDGE (CBS) - Here's an unusual one, a business owner who wants to raise his employees' pay. A unique experiment is about to begin for a chain of small restaurants in the Boston area, but will customers be willing to pay the price?
Welcome to Clover in Cambridge. The Harvard Square restaurant opened five years ago, the first of six Clover restaurants serving healthy fast food, along with seven food trucks working the streets. It's chickpea fritters and Brussels sprout sandwiches and business is good.
Owner Ayr Muir plans to open five more restaurants in the next six months. "Freshness is really important to us. We make our food from scratch every day," he says. Muir pays his nearly 300 employees more than minimum wage, $11 an hour on average, but he says that's not enough. He wants to go to $20 an hour. "Why should food service be an industry where you can't earn money? Why should that be assumed, that if you make a sandwich you can't make very much money," Muir says.
He's going to do it slowly over the next couple of years, raising some prices in 25-cent increments with the increase going to the workers. "Over the course of two years we could get to the point where our sandwiches are about $10 for a sandwich. Right now they're $6.50," he says.
He'll carefully monitor sales and if they go the wrong way, he'll stop. But adds that past price increases haven't resulted in less business. Customers we talked to were on board, at least in theory. "I would definitely be open to it, knowing the good cause," says Liv Larsen, a regular customer who works nearby. "I don't think that would scare me away at all. I would still come," says Nicole Kurvics who also eats here regularly.
The first increase happens in about two weeks and there's a strong business reason behind it. With happier employees, the hope is that there will be less turnover, fewer training costs and better customer service. Right now minimum wage in Mass. is $9 an hour and it's scheduled to go up to $11 by 2017.
