Dan is the CEO of Seattle-based credit card payments processing firm Gravity Payments, and three months ago, he did a funny thing. 

After talking with a friend who confessed to having difficulties making student loan payments and rent each month on an annual salary of $40,000, Dan decided to set a $70,000 per year pay floor at Gravity.

Dan was not, The New York Times says, looking to insert himself into "the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor." All he wanted to do was improve the lives of the 120 or so people who worked for him and after reviewing some literature on the subject, he decided that $70,000 was the level at which workers start to experience "an enormous difference in [their] emotional well-being."

Predictably, the initial response to the new policy was quite positive. Here's The Times:

Talk show hosts lined up to interview Mr. Price. Job seekers by the thousands sent in résumés. He was called a "thought leader." Harvard business professors flew out to conduct a case study. Third graders wrote him thank-you notes. Single women wanted to date him.

But even as Dan adjusted to life as a rebel hero and basked in his newfound popularity among third graders and single women, he quickly learned that whether he liked it or not, he had waded waist deep into the minimum wage debate and he would soon discover a few very hard lessons about the unintended consequences of hiking the pay floor. 

First, some employees felt it wasn't fair to indiscriminately give everyone a raise. That is, some felt Gravity should at least pay lip service to the notion that there's a connection between higher pay and performance and because the new pay plan didn't seem to acknowledge that link, the company lost some workers.