If you want to get the minimum wage increased, sadly it's not enough to get a majority of citizens on your side. (What do you think this is, a democracy?) You need pressure from the people with money: executives and big-business-owners. And that is a class of people that hates parting with money. So, how do you get them in favor of paying minimum-wagers more money? You start with three words.
Customers outnumber employees.
Assume you are one of those businesspersons.
If a large part of your customer base is at or near the minimum wage, then an increase in that minimum puts more money in their hands, and therefore in yours. If you do a volume business, that's huge. And in a typical retail/service business, customers can outnumber employees by hundreds or thousands. So the slightly-more-money you pay your staff is swamped by the additional money in your customers' pockets. Picture a Wal-Mart, and think about almost every customer there having a few more bucks in their pocket. You know that money is going straight into the registers.
But, no one is going to want to go first. (Well, almost no one cough Costco cough.) You don't want to pay your staff more, you want everyone else to pay their staff more. So the only way this can work is to force everyone to raise salaries at the same time. One-two-three-GO!
Hey, that's how increasing the minimum wage works! Who knew?