Don’t you guys get it?
If you paid $20/hour, you would get better qualified workers and they would do a better job and things like this wouldn’t happen.
If you paid $20/hour, he would have more money to spend on things and that would be better for all of us.
If you paid $20/hour, he wouldn’t have to work as much and he would have more leisure time and could perfect his snow shoveling skills while on vacation in Aspen.
Actually, that's true. Or, more accurately, you would have a far better chance of hiring and retaining a qualified person.
Used to train franchisees. Tried to get through their skulls that the cost of labor consists of more than the cost/hour paid to an employee. It's your total cost to accomplish a given amount of work.
There's the cost of training (and retraining), cost of dealing with mistakes made by an employeee, cost of additional supervision required by less competent employees, average production per hour, etc.
On average, all of these other costs go down, or at least have the potential to go down, when you pay more than minimum wage.
Few of them ever got it. Employee wage rate is easy to track, so that's how they "controlled costs."