Price Floor Simulator
A legal minimum sounds like protection for sellers. Slide the floor above equilibrium and watch: surplus piles up, quantity traded falls, and unemployment or government warehouses fill. Try the minimum wage, the U.S. milk price support, or the 1970s cheese mountain.
Floors help the sellers who sell
A binding price floor raises income for the sellers who actually transact. But total quantity traded falls, so some sellers are shut out entirely. In the labor market, that shows up as unemployment — workers willing to work at the minimum wage but no employer willing to hire them at that price.
In agricultural markets, the surplus doesn't disappear — the government usually buys it. The USDA maintained dairy price supports from 1949 to 2014, at times storing so much butter and cheese that Reagan's administration ran the famous "government cheese" giveaway of 30 million pounds in 1981. The EU's Common Agricultural Policy did the same at even larger scale — the mid-1980s cheese mountain hit 1.3 million tons.
The empirical minimum wage debate is more subtle: real labor markets aren't perfectly competitive, employers often have monopsony power, and modest hikes may cause little job loss. But the diagram shows the classic textbook case — and the trade-off it forces you to think through.