New wage law prompts CoHo to raise prices

Minimum wage in California will be set to $15 by 2022, making it more costly to pay employees

An increase in prices at the CoHo at the start of Fall Quarter have drawn student backlash — “I don’t feel like [the increase] is fair, looking at how much we pay for tuition,” said Yara Habeeb, a third-year computer science major. The recent price increases, however, resulted from a California minimum wage law that goes into effect in 2022.

Public Information Officer for the California Department of Industrial Relations Paola Laverde explained that Senate Bill 3, signed into law by former Calif. Governor Jerry Brown in 2016, states that by 2022 the minimum wage of California will reach $15.

“It is a good thing that minimum wage is going up for workers, because the cost of living in California has increased,” Laverde said. “It had been stagnant for a while, so there was a push in 2016 to increase the minimum wage to $15 dollars.”

Darin Schluep, food service director for Associated Students Dining Services, said the CoHo management team never takes pricing decisions lightly, but, unfortunately, because of the increased minimum wage, this was a necessary and unavoidable decision. 

“The annual increase in minimum wage ($1.00 more per hour each year until it reaches $15.00/hr. in January 2022) means approximately $200,000 in added costs each year that we must take into consideration when setting our budget,” Schluep said via email. “Rather than looking at cutting staff, we have worked to find ways to increase efficiency and to leverage our buying power for better pricing on goods. But ultimately some of those additional costs must be passed on to the consumer in order for us to continue to operate on a break-even financial basis.” 

Written by: Isabella Beristain — features@theaggie.org