HOLLYWOOD — The new year brought a bigger paycheck for many of the people who make the tourist economy run, and a fresh set of calculations for the small restaurants that feed the same crowds.
A higher minimum wage for hotel and tourism-sector workers took effect with the calendar turning, part of a phased increase the city adopted to lift the pay of those who staff its visitor economy. For the housekeepers and front-desk workers directly covered, the raise is the headline. For the independent restaurants clustered near the Boulevard’s hotels and attractions, the effect is more oblique but no less real: in a tight labor market, a rising floor next door pulls up the wages a cafe must offer to keep its own line cooks from leaving.
Most of the operators interviewed said they did not begrudge the raise. Several said their own workers deserved it and that they had been nudging pay upward for two years just to hold onto staff. The harder conversation was about the math.
“I’m not going to stand here and argue somebody shouldn’t be able to make rent. That’s a losing argument and a wrong one,” said Guillermo Bassani, who runs a small counter-service restaurant a few blocks off the Boulevard. “What I’ll tell you honestly is that my sandwich went up a dollar this month, and it went up because of this, and I’d rather say that out loud than pretend it didn’t.”
The adjustments are small and scattered. A dollar on an entree here, a trimmed lunch special there, a hiring plan quietly frozen at its current size rather than grown. A cafe owner said she had stopped opening for a slow midday shift that never quite paid for itself, concentrating her staff on the hours that do. None of it is dramatic on its own. Together it is the sound of a corridor of thin-margin businesses absorbing a cost.
Worker advocates who pushed for the increase say that is the point — that a visitor economy generating billions should not be staffed by people who cannot afford to live near the places they serve, and that modest price adjustments are a reasonable trade for wages people can survive on. They note, too, that better-paid workers spend money in the same neighborhood, some of it back across these very counters.
The restaurateurs mostly do not disagree in principle; they worry in particulars. A hot dog and a cold drink can only carry so much price before a family walking the Boulevard decides to skip lunch, and the operators near the attractions know their customers are counting dollars as carefully as they are. The season will show whether the higher prices stick or shave the traffic that pays them.
For now the kitchens run as they did, a little more expensively, the raise showing up first on the menus taped inside the windows. Bassani said he had reprinted his that week, changed a few numbers, and taped it back up, and that most of his regulars had not said a word.