Why, you ask?
Simple – he wants to increase the costs faced by his competitors in order to insulate his own business from competition:
“Chuck Collins, the organization's [Business for Shared Prosperity] director, described the group as ‘high-road businesses’ that are already ‘paying well over the minimum wage’ to their employees and must compete with companies that pay less.”
So I think that we can safely dispense with all of the nonsense about “good for the economy… good for workers”, and replace it with “good for Costco, since we’ll raise our competition’s costs”.
And what using the government to drive out your competitor makes Costco CEO Jim Sinegal a maverick? This is precisely consistent with how you would expect big business to operate. He can absorb the fixed costs of increased regulations, etc., when his smaller competitors can’t.
Adam Smith was on to this scam 230 years ago:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X
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