When you open a restaurant what is important besides good food and "location, location, location" is to not piss off the community that pays to eat at your snack shack or the employees that work for you. When you piss off both that must mean that you are shithead that doesn't deserve a restaurant or a petty, stingy teabagger. In this case it is both.Business hyenas and parasites also known as teabaggers (or as the PC term they assigned themselves "job creators") will nickle and dime you out of your hard earned money for shitty products and services, will refuse to pay decent salaries to employees and squeeze the labor out of you for pennies or peanuts, heck just to save a couple of bucks they will even monitor the time you are taking a shit.
So it is no surprise to me when a whinny teabagger who owns a restaurant in Minnesota called Oasis is starting to charge customers a "Minimum Wage Fee" on their checks because the state has recently decided to do the most horrendous thing of dun-dun-dun raising the minimum wage. And so the moron decided to add this .35 cents charge making the wait staff take the blame for this extra charge in front of the customer. (NOTE: the charge appears after the sales tax and therefore the teabagger is also engaging in tax evasion, surprise!)
As someone who used to work in the business for several years this is a giant FUCK NO. You do not charge customers an extra fee when the landlord raises the rent. You do not charge customers an extra fee when the A/C gets repaired. And you definitely do not charge customers an extra charge to pay for your wait staff's mandatory wage. All these real expenses are covered by revenues that are generated by the restaurant in food and beverage sales. And when an unexpected increase of costs occurs an intelligent business man (note intelligent here) would slightly increase the prices to cover that extra cost.What Oasis is doing is a political statement and not a wise restaurant business decision. Customers do not want to know all the details of a business ledger, all they want is good service, good food and drinks, at reasonable prices. Shoving this fee down their throats is just very tacky, out of whack, and it simply states that the owner is more interested in arguing about the minimum wage then he is about providing a great dinning experience. Might as well close up shop and just run a shady teabagger political action committee instead.
And of course many customers are having none of this bullshit and have started complaining at the restaurant's Facebook page.
So the smart ass behind this stunt has defended the fee as necessary to cover the increase of wages:
With regards to why we’re charging a $.35 fee to cover the recent $.75 increase in minimum wage…we estimate the increase in labor cost will will cost our company more than $10,000 per year…which has to be offset by an increase in revenue in order to operate profitably. Rather than increase the prices of our menu items, we chose to charge a flat fee. If the state of Minnesota would pass tip credit, like 43 other states have done, none of this would be necessary. For what it’s worth, we pay our people very well. Our dishwashers start at $10/hour, our cooks start at $12/hour and our servers average more than $20 when you consider what they earn in tips.
The above statement is just plainly deceitful. Even though he states that a waiter can make $20 an hour that wage is only feasible when customers have actually sat down. There are down times throughout the shift, times when you are doing side-work, or even (yes this happened at a restaurant I used to work at) washing the manager's car. During these times when you are working equally as hard you will only be earning the minimum wage because you are a waiter and for waiters' wage to be meaningful they need to get tips that only come from actually serving tables. So if you actually stretch out the $20/hour wage over an entire work day you are looking at $8-$9/hour. If you don't trust me, ask any waiter you know. Don't worry they'll tell you. They will tell you how hard they work for shit pay, how they have to haul heavy plates of shit food, deal with rude customers, drunks, running back and forth to get everything the customer needs. They do this because they have bills to pay and many of them have children's mouths to feed.So when I see the type of petty nonsense that wealthy restaurant owners do, even at the expense of hard working waiters, buss boys, and bartenders it just really pisses me and everybody else with any sense of ethics and morality off.
If there's a way we can ban teabaggers from hiring people, and therefore prevent human exploitation and slavery of sorts, we would better off.
