Incredibly, the article points out in almost as many words that the owners of the restaurant almost geometrically match the stereotype every conservative has of restaurantears who virtue signal their approval of laws that, historically, shred through restaurant jobs like wood chippers through particleboard end tables: they spent years really not paying much attention to their financials, floating on a wave of profits from a thriving business and a good location (and, let\u2019s be honest, really good food \u2013 I haven\u2019t been there in years, but I did love it) until almost literally waking up one morning and realizing they were in serious trouble.<\/p>\n
And you have to go about 2\/3 of the way down the article to get to this bit here:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe restaurant\u2019s staff of 180 was trimmed to 160, chiefly through attrition and by adjusting start times to better match the flow of customers, producing a wage savings of $170,000. \u201c<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I am sure that most of the cuts were \u201cthrough attrition\u201d – not only does the restaurant industry have famously high turnover, but so does any business when the owners start frantically slashing expenses – but let\u2019s break the story\u2019s numbers down: that\u2019s $170,000 in wages – the equivalent of 11 part time, 20 hours a week jobs at the new city of Minneapolis $15 an hour minimum wage \u2013 that don\u2019t exist anymore.<\/p>\n
So underneath all of the restaurant management\u2018s and started being as happy talk, what\u2019s happening is\u2026<\/p>\n
…Exactly what conservatives, business people and anyone who passed economics 101 and said would happen: the Minneapolis city council\u2019s wage and benefit laws are not just killing businesses, they\u2019re killing jobs.<\/p>\n
Of course, the virtue signaling Minneapolis city counselors and the bureaucrats who work for them don\u2019t work in restaurants (or any private sector or entrepreneurial business, for that matter); Minneapolis\u2019s restaurant industry has been one of the service industry\u2019s \u201cit\u201c sectors for decades, now, so I suspect they figure they\u2019ll always be another.<\/p>\n
By the way – I\u2019m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Hell\u2019s Kitchen\u2019s current owners furtively start looking for a buyer in the near future, that the expenses continue getting slashed, the Yelp reviews start spiraling, and the place quietly closes within five years. And if that happens \u2013 heaven forfend \u2013 the last thing the city, the Star Tribune or the restaurant’s compliant DFL management will do is blame the city’s policies for it.<\/p>\n
I hope not \u2013 I genuinely like eating there, although I actually can\u2019t eat there anymore – but I wouldn\u2019t bet against me on it, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years ago, when the city of Minneapolis jumped on the \u201craise the minimum wage to $15 and mandatory benefits\u201c bandwagon, the owners of popular downtown eatery \u201cHell\u2019s Kitchen\u201d led the way in virtue-signaling how very OK they were with it. And they stuck to their guns (their owners would not be OK with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,68,17,2,320],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-minneapolis","category-minnesota-politics","category-mndfl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68028,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68027\/revisions\/68028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}