“Welcome To Potemkin’s! I’m Chimera, I’ll Be Your Server”
By Mitch Berg
I’ll meet Mayor Frey halfway.
He’s supposed to be Minneapolis’s top cheerleader. It’s part of his job to blow smoke up the world’s collective nethers about the city.
So when he went on social media after about a week of his bizarrely illogical and unscientific vaccine mandate to say everything was hunky dory:
…it wasn’t in and of itself a surprise. Cheerleading the city, and their own policies even moreso, is part of a mayor’s job description.
Of course, the stats aren’t nearly as sanguine. Minneapolis table reservation via “Open Table” are off by…
…ahem…
…two thirds:
Now, it’s entirely possible the Mayor’s phone is flooded with photos of full restaurants. The number of choices in Minneapolis has plummeted. Literally, every place in Minneapolis where I used to do social events has disappeared in the past 20 months.
January 27th, 2022 at 11:22 am
lies, damn lies and statistics.
January 27th, 2022 at 11:24 am
Potemkins. Nice title.
January 27th, 2022 at 11:30 am
Minneapolis has always prided itself on being funded by things like event and licensing fees as much as property taxes.
They’ve gotten by for two years on federal government largesse (e.g., covid bux).
January 27th, 2022 at 11:33 am
And, BTW, much as I predicted, the “omicron wave” began to collapse nationwide a day before Frey’s vax passport scheme went into effect.
Another metric that can never be proven to have helped anyone, but can be shown to have hurt specific people and businesses. Doesn’t anyone here know how to play this game?
January 27th, 2022 at 1:12 pm
Doesn’t anyone here know how to play this game?
you can always conjure up pics to support your narrative ’cause pics don’t lie, dontchaknow?
January 27th, 2022 at 2:15 pm
Haven’t noticed any trouble getting a table in restaurants which offer table service. Not all have returned to it. Several are still in ‘take-out-only’ mode which I suspect might be a Washington County Health Department regulation based on square footage (six feet of separation in every direction means I need 36 square feet all to myself, not easy to do in a storefront Asian food operation).
By the way, “I’ll be your server” seems to have been the old phrase. The new phrase seems to be, “I’ll be taking care of you.” I suspect marketing believes it makes customers more receptive to wait staff upselling drinks and desserts. When a cute waitress says it to me, I want to raise an eyebrow and say, “Yeah baby!” but it makes my wife kick my shin, so I don’t.
January 27th, 2022 at 2:55 pm
Obviously, he’s lying like a pig in shit, because he doesn’t have to show the pictures of alleged “full tables”. Either that, or he assembled his bloated staff and that of the city CLOWNcil, then restaurant hopped for photo ops.
January 27th, 2022 at 5:20 pm
Anybody notice that Frey has a certain resemblance to Justin Trudeau? All he has to do is wear that kurta like Trudeau did when he visited India. (I’m told Nahendra retaliated by wearing a Mountie outfit when he visited Canada)
To the point, though, it strikes me that perhaps due to a bit of political protection, the kind of restaurants Frey likes are doing well, maybe some places like “Hammer & Sickle” or “Psycho Suzi’s”.
January 27th, 2022 at 10:39 pm
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January 28th, 2022 at 4:37 am
I downloaded the spreadsheet from the source. It’s worse than it looks, there was a significant dropoff of restaurant reservations in Minneapolis beginning 19 January, about 20%.
So Frey is lying. If the numbers were on his side, he could say the restaurant association reports no drop off in reservations since the 19th. But that could be subject to a fact check. So instead he cites never-seen pictures of packed restaurants.
But anyway you would have to be an idiot to believe that allowing fewer people to eat out and placing obstacles in the path of those who are allowed to eat out wouldn’t affect the number of people eating out.
January 28th, 2022 at 6:23 am
You can download the Open Table data here: https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry
https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry
January 28th, 2022 at 8:26 am
Here is Minnesota’s data demonstrating the tremendous power of vaccination. Again, the death rate for the vaccinated is the line down by the x-axis:
Cases, Hospitalizations, and Deaths Over Time
https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbt.html#data
January 28th, 2022 at 8:48 am
Won’t argue about what has happened in Minneapolis or the restaurant business, but what exactly is being measured here?
The answer is the business app OpenTable which did a rollout from free to $265/month. So is there a drop in reservations or a drop in reservations through OpenTable?
And any mention here of competition and other opportunities for the clients?
Having said that, I do notice a Doppler shift from red to blue as on reads down the chart.
January 28th, 2022 at 4:53 pm
Hard to disentangle, Greg. There is probably a bias difference between small, going broke restaurants and doing okay restaurants who subscribe to open table. Open Table has been a subscription based business for at least a decade.
The point, as usual, is that this restaurant reservation activity is information that we, as citizens (not subjects) need to know to properly determine public policy regarding covid restrictions.
As usual, it is hidden from us.
January 28th, 2022 at 5:13 pm
What MP is saying that if a higher percentage of restaurants that went out of business were small guys who were not on opentable, than the statistics shown, as bad as they are, are way skewed to show the situation better than it actually is.
And yes, as usual the raw data is hidden from us. Heck, if Moore can refuse to show raw data under a subpoena, data that is OWNED by us since it was generated by NASA, what is to be said for data owned by a private company? Oh wait, it will be pried out if it was politically expedient to the libturds.
January 28th, 2022 at 10:31 pm
Unvaccinated people 65 and older are 52X more likely to be hospitalized from Covid-19 compared to the vaccinated/boosted. For 50-64 year olds, the difference is 46X. Major difference in every age group, including 12-17 year olds.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination
January 29th, 2022 at 1:19 pm
^^Someone still trusts the CDC 🙂
What makes the CDC so trustworthy in your eyes, Emery? The constant message-garbling, the conspiring to defame the signers of the GBD? Or is it the downplaying of China’s role in producing the virus?
January 29th, 2022 at 3:23 pm
^ You’re fully vaccinated and boosted — why don’t you strap on a pair of balls and just admit…
January 31st, 2022 at 8:32 am
Emery, take a close look at the MN data. Look at the time stamp, and tell me what very significant things have happened since the beginning of that period.
As Disraeli is said to have noted, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
February 3rd, 2022 at 6:00 am
[…] Bars and restaurants, closing in record numbers for two years, are “packed full of people“. […]