Here's a trick that is pulled on you.
“Raising wages would hurt small businesses.”
Yeah, it could, if you fuck with it too rapidly, and without any consideration. On the other hand, large businesses have enough money to weather more ups and downs. Look at any big company that talks about big mac prices or whatever the fuck. Their stock price changes can move the valuation of that company by more money than it costs to purchase one of those same small businesses, and they could do it out of spite. They do, when workers unionize, a lot of the time, just close a location.
On the other hand, small businesses can't just close a location to combat that kind of stuff. There is a genuine problem for them to, because so many of those small business owners are workers too. If you own a cafe, but you run it yourself, you are a worker. You pay yourself in the value you provide to a business. If you are smart about it, you incorporate and pay the business, and pay yourself from the business, even though there are taxes involved.
However, if you raise wages for everyone who is broke as fuck, those small businesses will have more income if they actually address a market for which there is demand, and supply, but people simply don't have enough money to do it. We're in a high-productivity economy without a lot of time off. People would order take out. Thing is, people don't order take out from McDonalds usually, when they're picking shit off grubhub or ubereats or whatever. When people actually have the money and time to care about their food, they eat at small businesses. The money given in wages will stimulate that economy, not kill it. However, that economy is a direct competitor for the people who want to keep wages down, so it's not so good for them to support it. They just won't tell you that that's what they're doing. They call it something else and distract you with something so they can pull of their magic trick.
If you want to see an example of how simply giving people money can help the economy, not hurt it, look at the economic return on investment for SNAP and programs that provide grocery money to the needy. It is known that food stamps have one of the best economic ROIs among ways to stimulate economies. Simply giving people money for food helps the economy because people get to spent some amount of money on things that aren't just food, and it purchases food that could have easily gone to waste. Because it could easily have gone to waste, the cost is minimized. After all, a lot of that food would have a value of zero. Now it will have a value greater than zero.
That is efficiency, but it is denied on the basis of things like “work ethic” or “I saw someone buy steaks with food stamps.” Who the fuck cares how they budget if it works for them? There are many splurges that people make for special occasions or whatever. Let people be human, let them eat some damn steaks, let them have a barbeque from time to time. Poverty is punishing enough, but we are told to further punish people in poverty with the restriction of having an unsatisfying life, as though they deserve it for their circumstances. This is not reasoning for efficiency. It is a calculated, malicious attack on your intelligence, and it is meant to reinforce your belief that other people are better or worse than you due to circumstances. Many people fall for it, even though they don't realize it, and wouldn't fall for it if they were thinking actively about it. These are people who have studied rhetoric as a calling for decades, and the contributions they left on society were only measured by the size of the trench they left to divide people.
You are battling people who have been reinforcing a trend that has existed for longer than anyone has been alive, and that is why wages are low. It is the result of an intentionally hidden, intentionally complicated and coordinated attack, and the purpose of it is to maintain a system of rules in which worker wealth is minimized, and supposedly complex thought experiments are thrown at people just to confuse them. If you're a nerd and like IT comparisons, it's like if they launched a DDOS attack on your will to live but also, you couldn't even tell what kind of attack it is.