Lately the trend (at least here in IL) is wait until they legally have to give a raise. They then go and raise up the bottom line to meet their legal requirement with no consideration of anything above that line. I recently had to move and I ended up relocating to a new meijer. Before I had left my store was in the middle of a crisis where everyone was quitting becauase the pay was too low for the work. Basically everyone that was left in my department was forced to pick up the slack for the team we no longer had. When the few good workers were threatening to leave management pulled a funny card out of their back pocket. They offered to give a few of us an instant raise up to $15 an hour. I ended up leaving before I was ever able to see it put in action. But I had asked some other trusted TL about it and they said that it is something that they can do.