This new $15 line means that a very large group of labor in the US now earns less than the lowest paid Amazon worker. It removes one of the two or three primary criticisms of Amazon (at least for a while).
It's in fact a labor hammer on mom & pop businesses - who never pay well - at a time when there's an intense labor shortgage. Most likely, Amazon had to raise wages to fill its labor growth demands, and it's a PR benefit simultaneously.
Given Amazon's profits are set to explode higher in the next few years, with AWS and advertising (~$20b in profit in 2020 is likely), it'll give them a competitive advantage to continue to raise wages as necessary and crush everyone else that can't follow. Your typical small or mid-size retailer simply can't generate the kind of return that Amazon can from advertising (which has extreme margins), it puts them in a competitive league above and beyond, which will spill over to being able to better compete on labor. It's good for labor, bad for competitors.
