[anthony_james]

That's not necessarily true. A $15 minimum wage is a doubling of the wage rate in most states, and as a result, doubles the incentives for someone who automates the minimum wage jobs out of existence.

It's all relative. If we assume entrepreneurs want to deliver a million dollars worth of value and the minimum wage was $8, they would have to automate 125,000 jobs out of existence in order to achieve $1,000,000 worth of value-added. With a $15 minimum wage, they now only need to automate ~67,000. That's almost half the work they'll need to do now for the same result.

[andrewclunn]

The limitations of things like self checkout have been largely customer driven, the expense of equipment (installation, repairs, etc...), and the logistics of such a transformation. I think there are many more hard limits on the ability to replace on site service workers with technology than most people realize. The barriers are far greater than a few dollars an hour per employee. If they weren't the low wage service workers would have already been replaced. This is also not an area that drives technological innovation, but rather benefits from advances made by other industries, so I do not believe that raising the minimum wage would escalate this process.