Tag: closing

THE REALITY OF A $15 MINIMUM WAGE

Only a government drone, liberal moron, or union douchebag couldn’t see this coming from a mile away. Instituting a mandatory $15 minimum wage is about the dumbest government enforced idea ever. When Seattle announced it, Obama and his liberal minion hordes applauded and declared victory in the war against greedy capitalists. Now it goes live in two weeks. The impact in the real world is already being felt and will really sink in after more small businesses close up shop, more workers lose jobs, and prices jump for everything in the socialist paradise of Seattle.

Of course restaurants were going to close. All restaurants operate on very thin margins. That’s why very few survive over the long-term in the first place. Family owned restaurants are always living on the edge. This is how it works in the real world. Waitresses at restaurants are paid approximately $2.83 per hour. Oh the horror!!! A waitress working a 4 hour lunch shift or dinner shift at a moderately priced bar/restaurant can generally make between $80 and $120 in tips. That is $20 to $30 per hour, along with their $2.83 pay. According to the IRS, 10% of their total sales must be declared as tip income.

The restaurant only incurs $11.32 of expense for the 4 hour shift for each waitress. They incur huge costs for food, liquor, equipment, utilities, and the avalanche of taxes, fees, and regulatory expenses weighing them down from government drones. With profit margins of 5% or less, a mandatory $15 minimum wage for every waitress increases that labor cost by more than 500%. Their choice is to raise prices drastically, which will drive patrons away, or shut down. Consumers will not accept menu prices going up 25%. The restaurant is forced to close by government mandate.

It’s the same with mandatory sick days. Philadelphia just passed a law requiring small businesses to give every worker 10 sick days. In the restaurant industry, if you are sick you call a fellow worker to take your shift. It’s rarely a problem. Now the restaurant is stuck with the drastically higher expense of owing sick days to dozens of workers.

The control freak liberals act like they are helping the poor and disadvantaged, when all of their laws, regulations and taxes do is make more people poor and disadvantaged. What a fucked up country.

 

Seattle restaurants going dark as $15 an hour minimum wage goes into effect

Guest Post by Rick Moran

Seattle is about to embark on a civic experiment that most experts predict will be an economic disaster; a $15 an hour minimum wage is set to go into effect on April 1st. And some restuarants in the city have already shuttered their doors and are either going out of business or moving to friendlier climes.

This was entirely predictable – and was predicted when the measure passed the Seattle city council. Restuarants are particularly sensitive to this sort of increase in wages since most of their employees are paid at the minimum, and such a large percentage of their operating costs go to labor.

Continue reading “THE REALITY OF A $15 MINIMUM WAGE”

ROLLING CRAPS

This picture and comment was posted by Rick Ackerman in September 2012. Take a bow Rick. You were right.

Workers are shuttering the $2.4 billion white elephant of Atlantic City – Revel Casino. Fat Boy Christie will hold another summit to save Atlantic City in a couple weeks. Watch out NJ taxpayers. He has already wasted hundreds of millions on Revel and the rest of this dying town.

Atlantic City has always been a shit town. The casinos promised to revive the city. They did nothing for the city. They cashed in the profits from having a monopoly on the east coast. Now everyone has casinos and their revenues have plunged by 50% in the last eight years. Four casinos have gone belly up this year.

Atlantic City will not be revived. It’s a dangerous shithole inhabited by Obama voters. More casinos will close. The city budget now has a gaping hole as property taxes and sales taxes from the casinos are gone. How are the free shit army going to get their goodies?

The short sightedness and idiocy of politicians and CEOs has never been more on display than with the implosion of Atlantic City. Fast Eddie Rendell and the rest of the politicians who see gambling and lotteries as the savior for their bloated entitlement budgets will all find out you can’t get blood from a stone. The disposable income of the stupid is almost all gone.

Via Star Ledger

As Atlantic City casinos close, ghost town replaces boardwalk empire

It was 90 degrees at the Jersey Shore yesterday and the north beach in Atlantic City was almost empty.

The boardwalk, too, except for a few tourists who wandered up the quarter mile of bare boards to gawk and photograph the mirrored walls and imposing tower of the resort’s latest glass-and-steel white elephant, the Revel.

The exterior murals of Revel have a surfing endless summer kind of theme, but what is happening in Atlantic City now is the beginning of a long winter.

The Showboat closed Sunday and next door neighbor Revel closed Monday, taking with them about 4,000 jobs, leaving the north end of the boardwalk a ghost town.

Trump Plaza, which is connected to the famed Boardwalk Hall, will close Sept. 16, after the Miss America pageant.

Miss America returned to home Atlantic City two year ago, seven years after running off to Vegas, to fulfill its original promise of bringing tourists to the boardwalk for New Jersey’s beautiful month of September. But it won’t save Trump Plaza, which along with Caesars next door, were the center stanchions of Atlantic City’s gambling era heyday.

This was in the mid-1980s when the town hosted the megafights of the day: Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks; Tyson and Larry Holmes; Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran III; and, Evander Holyfield and George Foreman.

The casinos led by Trump and Caesars kicked in for site fees and Vegas couldn’t compete. But that is ancient history now, as ancient as Caesar himself.

When Trump Plaza closes, the workforce casualties will rise to nearly 6,000, about 20 percent of Atlantic City’s hospitality workforce.

Gaming in Atlantic City isn’t dead, but it has to go on a crash diet to survive.

The all-time high revenue of $5.2 billion from eight years ago has fallen by 50 percent, eroded by out-of-state competition, sometimes brought on by the very same companies that built up Atlantic City. (See The Sands in Bethlehem, Pa., which has siphoned off a huge piece of the New York bus trip market.) Now companies are closing even profitable casinos, like Caesars shutting The Showboat to try and protect the health of its three other properties in Atlantic City.

Bill Terrigino sees it not as the death of the town, but a painful evolution.

“The fascination of slot machines is over with,” Terrigino said. “More gambling isn’t the solution. If we don’t make it fun for people in Atlantic City, they’ll make us irrelevant.”

FUN IN THE SURF

And what could be more fun than that big blue thing out there.

From the start of the casino era, Atlantic City turned its back on its history as “the beach” and “the boardwalk.”

“The primary focus has been gambling,” said Bruce Abrams, who works in the city-run art museum across the boards from The Showboat. It was almost empty yesterday as was the adjacent history museum.

“We threw all the eggs in one basket. Maybe this is a wake-up call.”

True enough, the early casinos faced Pacific Avenue and trying to find the boardwalk through them entailed going through a maze of spinning wheels and ringing bells.

Still today, there are long stretches of the boardwalk with nothing to eat except in the overpriced casinos, few restrooms and changing facilities — and parking is expensive and distant.

Atlantic City took its greatest attraction and made it inaccessible.

As for amusements, the rides at the famed Steel Pier look like nothing more than a local church carnival bolted to the boards.

WHERE IS EVERYONE?

Even yesterday — 90 degrees and sunny on a day that is still summer for everyone without school children — the beaches were far, far from packed.

“Our beaches are beautiful. You can’t beat it,’ said Terrigino, “but other towns do better bringing people to the beach.”

Terrigino and his wife, Kathy, were two of the first workers to lose their jobs when the Atlantic Club closed last winter.

“These are the bookends,” said Terrigino, who lives across the street from Revel. “The Atlantic Club was all the way at the south end of the boardwalk, and Revel is at the north end. I lost my job last winter and yesterday (Monday) I lost my neighbor.”

They also own the house closest to the beach near the Revel.

Yesterday, there were more gawkers looking at the empty hotels — few as they were — and men pushing empty rolling chairs, than there were people on the north beach.

If you want to know what went wrong in Atlantic City, there it is.

If you want to know how to fix it, there it is.