Meet 31-year-old Dan Price.

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 New York Times says:

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 School  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.

Two of Mr. Price's most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Some friends and associates in Seattle's close-knit entrepreneurial network were also piqued that Mr. Price's action made them look stingy in front of their own employees.

Maisey McMaster was also one of the believers. Now 26, she joined the company five years ago and worked her way up to financial manager, putting in long hours that left little time for her husband and extended family. “There's a special culture,” where people “work hard and play hard,” she said. “I love everyone there.”

She helped calculate whether the firm could afford to gradually raise everyone's salary to $70,000 over a three-year period, and was initially swept up in the excitement. But the more she thought about it, the more the details gnawed at her.“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn't get much of a bump,”she said. To her, a fairer proposal would have been to give smaller increases with the opportunity to earn a future raise with more experience.

A couple of days after the announcement, she decided to talk to Mr. Price.

“He treated me as if I was being selfish and only thinking about myself,” she said. “That really hurt me. I was talking about not only me, but about everyone in my position.”

Already approaching burnout from the relentless pace, she decided to quit.