We slashed our staffing by 30%, and now people aren't coming here like they used. I mean, sure, they now have to wait 20 minutes before a server comes to their table. And the food is more limp and flavorless--especially since we stopped buying from local authentic sources and switched to Sysco and McCain for ingredients. But the REAL problem is that we have to pay our people more. Nobody wants to eat at a restaurant where they know the waitstaff isn't starving!
You can't get objective coverage of the restaurant industry. Restaurants rely on the media to steer business their way, and the media desperately needs hospitality advertising dollars. This creates an unholy synergy and a ridiculous amount of faux coverage.
Here's the thing: I live most of the time in the Metro DC area but we have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, mostly but certainly not all Trump Country. And the thing is that there are a lot of small businesses that fail there all the time. Part of this is definitely Wallmartization and the Loews and Home Depots displacing the Mom and Pops. But a big part is just that many of them are shitty little joints that survive mainly by really low rents or owner-occupied places but have little appeal. And while you don't see homeless people in rural areas, that's because they wouldn't survive for obvious reasons but you have plenty of really poor people living in double-wides or shacks that would otherwise be homeless. If Libertarians had their way, everyone - rural or urban would be desperately poor.
When a wingnut friend of mine passed that article along to me, I pointed out that the loss of restaurant jobs in NYC as a component of the statewide numbers roughy equaled the same percentage of jobs lost in the tariff wars imposed by his deity in the Oval Office. He didn't get the point, not from stupidity but from obtuseness.
And what will those taqueria owners forced to close do now that the restaurant business has been ruined by exorbitant minimum wages?
"To cope, restaurateurs like the Milners are moving from large-scale restaurants to small spaces. The Milners have Gabriela’s Taqueria at West 44th Street and Eighth Avenue. They are also working on the launch of a midtown vegan concept with their former chef from Elizabeth’s Neighborhood Table, which was adjacent to Gabriela’s before it closed in 2017."
When it comes to statistics and ax-grinding right-wing/libertarian assholes, you always have to question where they get them. For example, I don't see any stats on NYC restaurant employees for 2019 published yet at the BLS. But (surprise!) another reputable source tells a completely different story (note-the final minimum wage increases went into effect Dec. 2018):
NY State Dept of Labor
NYC restaurant employment from August 2018 to August 2019:
"If only those New Yorkers, who know nothing at all about making a buck, had listened to libertarian think tanks!"
Well, not everyone can open Sugar Daddy'z Bar & Grill (slogan--"Grab It, Gobble It, Then Get The Fuck Out, You're Wasting Space That You Didn't Pay For And Anyway That Belongs To Your Betters")
Any opponent of a livable minimum wage should be enslaved and worked to death on a latifundium with the scant consolation over his daily bowl of gruel that his labor cost his master of the universe nothing.
> […] in their world, a loss of 4,000 jobs would be massive, so it must be massive in New York, too.
I think that's also one reason, beyond the Racism that Goes Without Saying*, why immigration and especially illegal immigration numbers sound so dire to the people in small towns, when (for example) 1000 per day (probably about three or four times as many as do arrive) would, over the course of ten years, make a 1% difference in our total population.
* (also the name of the most bigoted auto in "The Phantom Tollbooth")
Now that we are getting far beyond the point where everyone need work for us to live well, how about a principle simply stating that a business that can't treat its workers decently and survive shouldn't survive?
Restaurants never fail on their own when we're discussing wages. IT's DEM WAGES! Average life of restaurant 1.5 to 3 years? Nothing to do with some hack joints going under when market conditions change. Market conditions include wages, morons. Maybe we could change the laws and do that thing in those dark tales about Scottish inns where they turn the guests into subsequent meals. That would work in a deregulated America.
Their children, or at least the interesting ones, would rather be with us than them, and that's hard on a parent. They don't always want to blame their children all the time, so blaming us is what's left—we can't be winning in a fair fight, so it must be voudou or Kabbalah at work. (Living in cities is a threat to the Pure Whiteness of even "Friends"-level segregatees, as anyone named 'Worthington Calvert III' from The City who is, in Alabama, taken for a Jew, can attest, preferably in as lock-jawed a voice as possible.)
We slashed our staffing by 30%, and now people aren't coming here like they used. I mean, sure, they now have to wait 20 minutes before a server comes to their table. And the food is more limp and flavorless--especially since we stopped buying from local authentic sources and switched to Sysco and McCain for ingredients. But the REAL problem is that we have to pay our people more. Nobody wants to eat at a restaurant where they know the waitstaff isn't starving!
You can't get objective coverage of the restaurant industry. Restaurants rely on the media to steer business their way, and the media desperately needs hospitality advertising dollars. This creates an unholy synergy and a ridiculous amount of faux coverage.
Here's the thing: I live most of the time in the Metro DC area but we have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, mostly but certainly not all Trump Country. And the thing is that there are a lot of small businesses that fail there all the time. Part of this is definitely Wallmartization and the Loews and Home Depots displacing the Mom and Pops. But a big part is just that many of them are shitty little joints that survive mainly by really low rents or owner-occupied places but have little appeal. And while you don't see homeless people in rural areas, that's because they wouldn't survive for obvious reasons but you have plenty of really poor people living in double-wides or shacks that would otherwise be homeless. If Libertarians had their way, everyone - rural or urban would be desperately poor.
When a wingnut friend of mine passed that article along to me, I pointed out that the loss of restaurant jobs in NYC as a component of the statewide numbers roughy equaled the same percentage of jobs lost in the tariff wars imposed by his deity in the Oval Office. He didn't get the point, not from stupidity but from obtuseness.
And what will those taqueria owners forced to close do now that the restaurant business has been ruined by exorbitant minimum wages?
"To cope, restaurateurs like the Milners are moving from large-scale restaurants to small spaces. The Milners have Gabriela’s Taqueria at West 44th Street and Eighth Avenue. They are also working on the launch of a midtown vegan concept with their former chef from Elizabeth’s Neighborhood Table, which was adjacent to Gabriela’s before it closed in 2017."
When it comes to statistics and ax-grinding right-wing/libertarian assholes, you always have to question where they get them. For example, I don't see any stats on NYC restaurant employees for 2019 published yet at the BLS. But (surprise!) another reputable source tells a completely different story (note-the final minimum wage increases went into effect Dec. 2018):
NY State Dept of Labor
NYC restaurant employment from August 2018 to August 2019:
Restaurants and Other Eating Places:
2018: 275.0
2019: 283.0
Increase of 2.9%
Full Service Restaurants:
2018: 168.4
2019: 171.9.0
Increase of 2.1%
Limited Service Eating Places:
2018: 106.6
2019: 111.1
Increase of 4.2%
https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/nyc/
https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/nyc/NYCcurr.xls
"If only those New Yorkers, who know nothing at all about making a buck, had listened to libertarian think tanks!"
Well, not everyone can open Sugar Daddy'z Bar & Grill (slogan--"Grab It, Gobble It, Then Get The Fuck Out, You're Wasting Space That You Didn't Pay For And Anyway That Belongs To Your Betters")
Any opponent of a livable minimum wage should be enslaved and worked to death on a latifundium with the scant consolation over his daily bowl of gruel that his labor cost his master of the universe nothing.
“ You’ve got to remember these are simple farmers..people of the land..the common clay of the new West..you know...morons.”-“Blazing Saddles”
> […] in their world, a loss of 4,000 jobs would be massive, so it must be massive in New York, too.
I think that's also one reason, beyond the Racism that Goes Without Saying*, why immigration and especially illegal immigration numbers sound so dire to the people in small towns, when (for example) 1000 per day (probably about three or four times as many as do arrive) would, over the course of ten years, make a 1% difference in our total population.
* (also the name of the most bigoted auto in "The Phantom Tollbooth")
Now that we are getting far beyond the point where everyone need work for us to live well, how about a principle simply stating that a business that can't treat its workers decently and survive shouldn't survive?
Restaurants never fail on their own when we're discussing wages. IT's DEM WAGES! Average life of restaurant 1.5 to 3 years? Nothing to do with some hack joints going under when market conditions change. Market conditions include wages, morons. Maybe we could change the laws and do that thing in those dark tales about Scottish inns where they turn the guests into subsequent meals. That would work in a deregulated America.
They're right to be afraid of us.
Their children, or at least the interesting ones, would rather be with us than them, and that's hard on a parent. They don't always want to blame their children all the time, so blaming us is what's left—we can't be winning in a fair fight, so it must be voudou or Kabbalah at work. (Living in cities is a threat to the Pure Whiteness of even "Friends"-level segregatees, as anyone named 'Worthington Calvert III' from The City who is, in Alabama, taken for a Jew, can attest, preferably in as lock-jawed a voice as possible.)