Haymarket Cafe in Northampton could easily be missed as you're walking along Main Street. The narrow storefront is inconspicuously marked with plain white text on the window and a faded hanging sign that is hard to read even if you're standing in front of it.

But taking a step inside on a late Tuesday morning, the tables in the dim hallway leading to the counter have plenty of people seated at them, sipping coffee, eating baked goods and enjoying the free Wi-Fi on their computers.

According to owner Peter Simpson, his dedicated customers are there for more than the food and drink; they're there because "for them, it means a lot that they're supporting a place that is paying a living wage."

In November 2015, Haymarket Cafe did away with tipping and started paying its employees $14 an hour, a $5 increase from the then-$9 minimum wage. The plan was to increase employee wages by $1 every year until workers were making $17 an hour in 2018.

Although Simpson wasn't able to meet his $17 an hour goal, he recognizes that "it's been a slow progression." The wages started at $14 an hour, jumped to $15 an hour at the beginning of 2017 and were raised to the current wage of $15.50 an hour just two weeks ago.

Massachusetts legislators passed a bill this week to increase the Massachusetts minimum wage. It is awaiting signature of Gov. Charlie Baker and if signed into law, Haymarket could be a living example of what businesses may look like in the future.

The bill, if signed, would gradually increase minimum wage from $11 to $15 an hour over five years and would increase the sub-minimum wage from $3.75 to $6.75 an hour along the same timeframe - changes that many argue would harm small businesses and result in increased unemployment.

But Simpson would argue otherwise. After all, three years after its initial wage increase, his cafe is still standing, and none of his 20 employees have been laid off.

In fact, when asked about what has changed in his cafe since 2015, every answer from Simpson is positive.

By doing away with tipping and raising wages, Simpson was able to even out the wage structure between front of the house and back of the house workers, eliminating the dichotomy that typically exists in the service industry between those in different positions.

"There's kind of a greater flow of labor ... to where it is needed," he said. "If it's busy out front, the cooks will come out and help. If they're really busy, we'll go back and do dishes. It kind of flows back and forth in a way that didn't really happen before."

Staff turnover has also all but disappeared - something that is essentially unheard of in the service industry. While restaurants usually experience turnover every few months, Haymarket has only hired one new person in the last two years.

With the same people working together four days a week for almost a year, there is "pretty strong stability in how the interactions are between the cafe employees and the customers ... which just makes the place work so much better," Simpson said.

But even with the bumps in wages being smaller than he had predicted, Simpson said that the consistency in pay -- now that employees aren't relying on tips and the generosity of customers -- has been the biggest positive change of all.

Speaking with employees at Haymarket, the response is much of the same. Sonia Perez, a 27 year old barista who has been working at the cafe for four years, remembers how difficult it was to make ends meet when she was making less, and how hard it was to plan ahead in her life when her pay was inconsistent.

Working for minimum wage, Perez said, just wasn't enough.

"The cost of living has been going up including transportation and gas and, you know, utilities, but the minimum wage has been pretty low," she said. "And it's hard. Especially if you're trying to go to school or you're trying to do other things, it's hard to be able to afford your own apartment."

But Perez also expressed that the positive changes in the cafe go beyond the pay.

"We're like a little family," she said, talking about the camaraderie among employees.

With Haymarket's unique pay structure, its consistent hours and its family of coworkers, Perez remarked that as an employee, "you're not going to find this anywhere else."

However, that doesn't mean that every change in the past three years has been inherently good.

Only six months after eliminating tipping and raising wages, and only a little more than three months after being recognized on the U.S. House floor as an effective business model for a higher minimum wage, Haymarket faced its first setback: The restaurant was forced to eliminate table service.

In a Facebook post announcing its new shift to a counter service-only cafe, Haymarket said, "With the new wage structure, we are finding that while our lunch business is solid enough to accommodate table service, the mornings and evenings are not."

Reflecting on this change today, Simpson admits that table service is something that he overlooked.

Explaining it from the perspective of a business owner, Simpson said that it's fine to have slow periods of table service when waitstaff is only getting paid sub-minimum wage. After all, paying a waiter $5 an hour for three slow hours is only $15 - mere pennies for a business. But paying that same waiter $15 an hour for three slow hours can become a problem.

But Simpson also recognized how hypocritical this mindset could be. In reality, he as a business owner was just experiencing the same struggle that wait staff experience every day.

"This is how it is for wait staff," he said. "You have these slow periods and these fast periods and ideally, the fast periods make up for the slow periods, or the busy days make up for the slow days. But the reality is, that's not ever really true."

Today, there still isn't table service at Haymarket, but the dining experience is more or less the same. No servers were laid off in the change, so the waitstaff just started working at the counter. Customers can order and pay there, and employees will still deliver food to tables and bus dishes.

Although each wait staff employee lost about two hours of work a week when table service was initially cut, Simpson said that the change in hours has "evaporated" and workers are currently back to working as frequently as they were before the change.

The other major change -- and the secret behind Haymarket being able to raise wages -- is increased prices. With labor costs jumping from 33 to 40 percent with the wage increase in 2015, Simpson initially raised prices at the coffee counter by 10 percent and at the downstairs restaurant by 20 percent.

And while prices have continued to increase with each wage bump, Simpson is quick to note that the increases aren't as drastic as people may think.

"I think a lot of people, when they're responding to the idea of the wages going to $15, they're tackling it in the way that you would tackle an inflation rise," Simpson explained.

With an inflation rise, prices across all business sectors need to increase. But in the service industry, labor is typically only one third of total expenses so, according to Simpson, prices only need to rise in relation to that one third.

In order to give every employee a $1 raise in 2017, prices at Haymarket were increased by 5 percent. The most recent 50 cent raise for employees was made possible by a 2.5 percent price hike, costing customers a nickel on a coffee.

Even when supporting higher wages and competing with businesses with lower prices, Haymarket has done well enough to support its other major initiative: the Common Account.

Essentially, the cafe has a "sliding scale menu," which means that "anyone can come to the cafe and pay anything they want for food," Simpson said. If someone goes to the counter and says they want to use the Common Account, they are asked how much they want to pay toward their meal. Even if they say $0, they are still served.

The Common Account is supported by customer donations and although the donations don't entirely cover the costs of the free food every month, Simpson says that was never the point.

According to Simpson, the Common Account "has had a pretty remarkable effect on people's lives who are homeless in this town. And it's a way for customers to donate directly to the homeless without any reservations or hesitations wondering what they're going to use that money for."

But even more than just providing food for the homeless, the Common Account enables homeless people "to be in an atmosphere that feels completely normal," giving them an opportunity to dine in a restaurant like everyone else, Simpson explained.

Although he doesn't want to publicize many details about the Common Account, Simpson does post a monthly bulletin in the cafe detailing how many times the Account was used that month and how much was donated. In May 2018, 283 meals were served through the Common Account, costing $3,385. Ninety four percent of that retail cost was covered through $3,184.51 in donations.

But between losing money through the Common Account most months, paying employees more and increasing prices past competing businesses, Simpson acknowledged that his business is at a bit of a disadvantage compared to other cafes and restaurants.

"We pay more sales tax, we pay more employee taxes and we pay higher wages," he said. "And thus, our prices are higher."

He continued, "When I first started the project, I approached five other cafes in town ... and no one wanted to join me. They were too freaked out by the idea -- their labor costs they felt like were already too high, they felt like it was a completely unsustainable idea."

Were the $15 wage initiative to pass, Simpson said that other businesses would have to raise prices as well which would "alleviate some of that pressure" that he feels. With an even playing field, Simpson said he'll have more maneuverability to raise Haymarket's minimum wage to $16 an hour and provide health care and other benefits for employees.

But that will depend on his continued success.

"I go to places because I like the food," Simpson said. "But I also go to places because I support their politics. And I would encourage people in the same way that they vote, that they also vote for what establishments they go to."