PUBELO — Small businesses in Colorado are seeing increased costs for materials, insurance, rent and labor and some stores are having to make some tough decisions.
For example, this year, employees in Colorado making minimum wage are now being paid $14.81. That is 39 cents more an hour than last year.
The increasing minimum wage across the state is impacting some businesses in Pueblo. Brian Redmond is no stranger to running a business or two. For the past year, he has been running two nutrition stores in Pueblo. One of which is Steel City Nutrition located on South Union Avenue.
“Payroll is already our biggest expense out of everything, so, knowing that it was going to increase just would have made it that much more challenging for us,” said Redmond.
He said he decided to sell his other store for a number of reasons, but one of them was because it costs too much to pay his five employees.
“Even without the increase, that was our biggest expense as a company,” said Redmond.
Starting in 2025, Colorado's minimum wage increased to $14.81 an hour.
“It's a pretty substantially high minimum wage. Being from Wisconsin, it's like double the minimum wage of what it is there,” said Redmond.
In 2006, Colorado voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that required the minimum wage be adjusted each year, up or down, for changes in inflation.
“I think just Colorado expenses and cost of living here is a little bit higher, typically, than... the national average per se,” said Redmond.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Colorado's is more than double.
To save money, Redmond said he and his fiance are Steel City Nutrition’s only employees because the extra staff is not worth the cost.
“It definitely makes it more challenging, we just have to adapt, and that's just kind of the nature of running your own business is being moldable,” said Redmond.
Out sick, taking a vacation or when they get married next week, Redmond said they will have to close the store.
“We're planning on probably just having the store to be closed those couple of days, just because it's hard for us to have someone on full time working while we're also working here, and then have them just pop in once a month whenever we have vacations or trips or those kinds of things going on,” said Redmond.
Redmond said Steel City Nutrition is focused on improving people’s health, getting more energy and improving fitness. He said he understands how the increase in minimum wage can help employees, but he said for local businesses it causes a challenge.
“There's a whole other side to things, aside from just paying someone's minimum wage that goes into account like inflation and business expenses and taxes and different things like that... are all incorporated with that too,” said Redmond.
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