Conor Hall takes pride in his knowledge of food. Each workday, he answers customers’ questions about which cheeses to pair with a particular salami, or what it means for a ham to be “uncured.”
Hall is an assistant deli manager at a King Soopers grocery story in Boulder. His shifts vary, sometimes forcing him to be up as early as 3 a.m. while other times he closes out the evening. Hall makes around $23 per hour now, well above the local minimum wage, but it hasn’t always been that way. When he started working at King Soopers six years ago, he earned under $13 per hour, just enough to scrape by without much in savings, he said.
He enjoys the work, and in particular, the sense of belonging and community he has developed over the last six years on the job. Plus, it’s near the Boulder neighborhood where he spent his teenage years.
“We're close to Fairview where I went to high school. I remember going to that store everyday for lunch,” Hall said.
He said Boulder feels like home–even though he’s never been able to afford to live in the city himself.
A start, but not enough
Boulder County raised the minimum wage to $15.69 effective Jan. 1, 2024. It’s over a dollar more than the state minimum wage, but the change commissioners voted to pass last November only affects businesses in unincorporated parts of the county. The city of Boulder and other area municipalities still recognize this year’s state minimum wage of $14.42.
Hall said even several years ago when he earned close to the county’s new minimum wage it was unsustainable. He could barely afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Broomfield and buy groceries. After paying for the essentials, he “had no money left.”
“Having had that be just enough to skate by, I can tell you: That's not enough to live off of in Boulder County,” he said.
Hall isn’t the only one concerned about low wages and high cost of living around Boulder. Julie Van Domelen, executive director of Boulder’s Emergency Family Assistance Association, said her organization has seen a significant uptick in demand for services since the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization saw a 62% increase in households visiting its food bank each month between 2022 and 2023.
"More and more, we're seeing people that can't make ends meet even though they're working one or two jobs," Van Domelen said. “Now it's people who are working, and they still are getting evicted and can't afford groceries.”
Inflation crushes
Olivia Elsasser knows what that’s like. Elsasser works as a house cleaner around Boulder, but she also routinely picks up gigs as a nanny, runs grocery deliveries and drives for rideshare apps. Even with multiple forms of income, she just scrapes by.
“It's like, yes, this pays my bills. But in no way do I feel secure,” she said. “There's not enough to save substantially.”
The 24-year-old moved to Boulder from Arkansas in 2018 to attend the University of Colorado and study political science. She said she had inherited just enough money from her deceased father to pay for tuition, but she was on her own when it came to paying for living expenses.
That quickly became too much for the full-time student. During her sophomore year, she began to realize something had to give.
“By that point, I had been struggling for quite a while and had been going to food banks,” she said. “That's when I decided to start working more.”
With that, she transitioned to part-time enrollment. A semester later, she dropped out.
For the past few years, she’s focused primarily on working so that she can stay in Boulder–even if it means renting a place with roommates because that’s all she can afford. It’s been rocky at times. Last summer she said she lived in her van with her two cats for a period.
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“There were a lot of reasons I ended up homeless over the summer, but one of the major ones was I tried to go back to school,” she said. “That cut in all that money, no matter how much you budget, and no matter how much you plan.”
Van Domelen with the emergency assistance association cited post-pandemic inflation and the rollback of temporary expansions of Medicaid and food stamps as part of the reason people are finding it harder to make ends meet these days.
“We’ve seen inflation just crush people,” Van Domelen said, citing a sharp uptick in the numbers of people her organization has served since the pandemic. “Those are big step ups in an affluent community where folks think that everything just went back to kind of normal.”
And there are disparities. Among those who utilized the family assistance association’s resources in 2023, half of all Spanish-speaking clients earned under $15 per hour at work, more than twice the rate of English speakers.
The cost of doing business
Van Domelen said she fully supports the county’s efforts to raise the minimum wage. In her eyes, every little bit can make a big difference in someone’s life–even just $1 per hour more, for example.
“For a year, that's $2,000 a year more in income,” she said of someone working full-time. “That can prevent homelessness. That can pay a month of rent.”
Not everyone was on board to raise the local minimum wage, though. Boulder Chamber CEO John Tayer called the county’s move to increase the minimum wage on Jan. 1 “unfortunate” and raised concerns about the potential impact on businesses affected by the increase–and even jobs lost due to the higher cost of labor.
“They are now going to have to cover this much higher cost for their workforce, which makes either them less competitive if they have to raise their prices to compensate, or can hit them really severely on their bottom line,” he said.
Tayer said it is important to assess the risks and benefits of any action on the minimum wage. He cited a 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that found a 50% increase in the city’s minimum wage over five years led to higher wages but lower employment rates, particularly for “the restaurant and the retail industries, in lower-paying establishments, and for lower-paid workers.”
Still, Conor Hall, the King Soopers assistant manager, believes it is the responsibility of the local business community to pay fairly for local labor.
“I don't think it's unreasonable to say, if you're going to do business in our community, you have to–you need to–pay enough,” he said. “If it's not coming out from your employer…it's gonna be paid out in welfare. It's gonna be paid out in, you know, emergency room visits that people can't pay for, which ends up being paid for by the community.”
What happens next?
Boulder County will continue to raise the minimum wage over the next six years with a goal of reaching a minimum of $25 per hour by 2030. The municipalities of Boulder, Erie, Lafayette, Longmont and Louisville are in the process of negotiating their own potential higher minimum wage, with plans for implementation by 2025.
Workers in Boulder should earn enough to afford the local lifestyle, John Tayer said, but he supports the careful process local cities and towns have taken on the matter thus far.
“What I would like to have seen Boulder County participate in is what is already happening at the municipal level in Boulder and with other surrounding communities. And that is a deep conversation about both the need to make sure that we're addressing economic equity concerns,” he said, “But also, at the same time, being very thoughtful about: What are the impacts to our business community?”
Meanwhile, Olivia Elsasser continues to balance a number of jobs in Boulder in order to afford her rent each month. Going back to school? That’s off the table, for now at least.
She said she was excited to learn the county has a plan in place to maintain wage growth as the cost of living continues to increase. She hopes the city of Boulder will follow suit.
“It's a little almost, like, comforting to know that they have a plan to continue to increase it,” she said of the county’s minimum wage ordinance, “knowing that if I am still working minimum wage in five years, that I won't be making the exact amount I am right now.”
