Whole Foods cut its workers hours after Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15.

Whole Foods said hours have stayed the same since the minimum wage increase.

“Claims that Whole Foods Market is reducing hours as a result of increased wages are false. In fact, on average, our full-time store Team Members worked the same number of hours in January and February 2019 as they did during the same period last year. We are proud to have increased the hourly wage for all store Team Members, and we will continue to schedule labor hours based on individual store needs to create the best experience for our Team Members and customers,” the statement read.

Amazon was initially praised after announcing the move to increase minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though it also cut stock vesting plans and bonuses for its workers.

The Austin-based grocery store has been on Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for the past 20 years and has boasted one of the highest ratios of full-time and part-time employment among its competitors. However, after being purchased by Amazon, employees have been more critical about working as “America’s healthiest grocery store.”

This is what happens when liberal values meet reality, and it proves what conservatives have been saying for decades. You can’t just arbitrarily increase people’s salaries to absurd levels without having to make cuts or increases somewhere else. In this case it looks like Whole Foods decided to cut worker hours instead of increasing prices.

It’s just like with taxes. You raise them on businesses to make them pay their fair share, they responded by cutting workers or increase prices – or both! – in order to make ends meet.

Let’s do some math based on what’s reported above. I don’t know what Whole Foods was paying its part-time workers, but let’s assume they were paying them $10/hr. At 30 hours that’s $300 in earnings. Increase the minimum wage to $15 and cut their hours to 21 and now they’re being paid $315. It almost cancels the entire increase out. If they were paying them $11/hr before the increase, then after the increase they are actually being paid $15 less.

The bottom line is that it’s clearly kabuki theater for Amazon to raise their minimum wage to $15 per hour, because many of their employees just aren’t getting paid extra money to help them live better lives because their hours have been severely cut. Not to mention how frustrating it must be to have to do the same amount of work in less time.