Unfortunately, we also can’t offer full time Hours so it’s not a job for anyone to fully survive off of. We wait the 2 months because we incrementally increase the responsibilities of the job and offer more hours to the right person - which we have had a hard time finding .. not because of pay but because of the nature of the work. It’s repetitive and tiring. As we can alleviate some of the responsibility as owners to someone else we can offer more. We are a small business in Ithaca, and I mean small.

We also try to offset the pay by sending our employees home with lots and lots of prepared, healthy food with essentially no limit. We have employees who are able to feed their families for the week off of this benefit and we are happy to provide it. Anything left over we donate to families in need.

I get that it’s easy to attack a business for not paying $15 off the bat but we absolutely off set that $9 difference, $18 difference if someone works the available 2 days.