I think we're circling around the issue but not nailing it. Inflation is NOT when a few businesses raise their prices. In the absence of other factors, if they do that, they usually either suffer a lapse in demand and have to lower them again, or customers have less money after buying inflated goods and other vendors start losing sales and have to lower prices. System price increases, which is how inflation is generally defined, does not occur.
In fact, measurable inflation as most people understand it, is utter nonsense. How on earth could anybody, including the government, know how much the prices of everything in the country have changed? They can't. They pick a very few prices and claim that they are representative of everything. It's absurd, especially since government cherry-picks the items that they're going to price in order to get the results that they desire.
The only kind of inflation that is worth thinking about is the original kind: MONETARY inflation. Increases in the money supply. It, coupled with productivity changes, are what spur price changes. Even that's not easy to measure because if money is printed but saved instead of spent then price changes don't occur. At a later date, when no additional money has been created but the saved money gets spent, THEN the impact on prices is seen.
Bankers and politicians love this kind of crap. It's just complicated enough that they can spout some ridiculous tale about inflation and pretend that they had nothing to do with it. In reality, since productivity doesn't change very rapidly at all, bankers and politicians have EVERYTHING to do with creating inflation.
But the minimum wage does not. It can create a sluggish, less productive economy and thereby cause small systemic price increases, but the real impact of changes in the minimum wage is practically zero.
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