If you cannot pay people a living wage, you don’t deserve to be in business period!
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Don’t worry, I’m sure the New York Post talked about how well this business was run, how much revenue they were generating, and their other expenses, rather than just focusing on the minimum wage in order to appease wealthy Republicans. I’m sure that happened.
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She could still work herself you know. Limit opening hours a bit and you have a nice 40 hour workweek and minimum wage doesn’t apply for yourself.
Funny how it’s never “cool, workers now have more money to spend on eating out”. But let’s cry for the owners who fail to take advantage of that fact …
“Bad business owner can’t run a business”.
Eat less avocado toast and drink less fancy lattes. That should help her budget better.
NYPost doing NYPost things.
Wow okay. I live in West Seattle where this business is. Cant believe how false this is. She operates that very tiny waffle house in tandem with a plant shop. She closed down because shes turning it into an event space as she has more success with that. Also, that space is so tiny you could probably fit 6-7 customers in there at a time. I think she probably has 2 people working there with her so claiming that the minimum wage crap is the problem is wild. Shame on mainstream media once again.
Oh no! Not one less coffee shop?! If this keeps up, they’ll only be on every other corner!!!
20 an hr for Seattle is not radical. Even on that wage, you wouldn’t be able to find an apt within city limits you could afford. I live in a much cheaper part of the Pacific Northwest, and even our min wage is over 15 an hr.
“Seattle Business owner can somehow only budget for slave wages and blames her workers for not wanting to be homeless”
Don’t post that fuckin rag here.
They’re full of shit 90% of the time
The min wage went from $19.97 in 2024 to $20.29 in 2025. So she closed over 32 cents?
Every other restaurant in Seattle didn’t immediately shut down yesterday when the $20.75 minimum wage went into effect, maybe they’re just bad at this
EDIT: I just learned this was part of planned minimum wage increase that started in 2015 and would gradually raise it to $20 over 10 years, she literally had a decade to prepare for this
Most of the employers that shut down in Seattle that are quick to blame the minimum wage won’t tell you the real reason they’re closing – they can’t meet the ridiculously high commercial real estate rent. Blaming rent doesn’t get you an article in the news.
The NY Post being shitty as usual. It was a combined stress on the business with inflation and lower foot traffic due to an increase of WFH.
More a failure of the federal government – federal policy should raise minimum wage in line with cost of living and overall productivity – if minimum wage matched productivity growth since the last minimum wage hike in 2009 the federal minimum wage would be something like $23/hour
JUST TAX THE BILLIONAIRES. HOLY FUCK! No waffles!!!???
Honestly, knowing a lot of business owners, I know a lot have tight margins. The problem is usually rent! Landlords are universally fleecing us! There isn’t room for worker wages without addressing the rent scam
My wife worked for a vet who once said that she needs her staff to work harder because she deserves a nice vacation a couple of times a year, but she didn’t give vacation time to any of the vet techs. My wife didn’t work there long.
Political stunt.
Crazy that people are expected to work for less than a livable wage
I remember an article from Norway about a woman who was shutting down the restaurant she owned because she couldn’t find any chefs willing to work for the wages she offered. She freely admitted that she was making enough money and that higher wages would not be detrimental to the business, but she didn’t want to pay them more, so she shut down instead.
I think she wrote that sign in 3 different personalities
Nobody should be in poverty so that you can have your dream waffle shop. She can work there herself until she can afford to pay a worker a living wage,
People have a right to a living wage, not the right to own a business. If you can’t pay a living wage with what your business makes- you simply aren’t good at business
New York post is a worthless right wing propaganda shit rag. Don’t waste your time with it. Very likely this whole thing could be fake.
Wtf is with that handwriting
Capitalism = exploitation
Everyone is acting like the few workers covering a 50hr open period per week, but the real costs that are shutting down these businesses is the rental fees. It’s not the workers driving this, but the landlords.
I think the broader goal is to create an unsustainable environment for both small businesses owners and consumers- pushing economic activity to huge companies.
Imagine if you replaced labor with any other obvious expense in this headline. “I had to shut down my waffle business because I didn’t want to pay full price for flour.” “I didn’t want to buy waffle irons, so I had to close my waffle shop.” You’d be rightly ridiculed and never print something like that. But the moment *people* are the cost you don’t feel like you should have to pay for, they can’t put you in the papers fast enough.
How much you want to bet that she didn’t try to run her business with the new minimum wage? She is making an excuse for her already failing business.
This shits so dumb. If your not making enough money to pay a couple employees 20$ an hour, then your obviously not charging enough, earning enough, or the most obvious, not doing any work yourself. I’ve seen this attitude with so many dumbass owners in my life. They think their job is to just collect money and sign checks. Both my parents have at one time in their life’s ran businesses almost completely on their own or only hired a few hands. Made great money but usually worked more than 40 hrs Proudly. Fuck the rich, fuck them all. Pay the people or work like everyone else.
If $20/hr puts you out of business, you were going out of business anyway. I worked for a small pizza restaurant in MA for a decade and they had no issues paying us fairly. None at all, and the owner still made bank. Last I heard, they’re starting people at $20/hr now.
We’ve been talking about minimum wage for so long.I think it’s time we start talking about maximum wage
An older business in Seattle called Husky Deli, which is in the same part of town as this place, just reduced their hours because of the new minimum wage.
Meanwhile, I know someone who runs their own business at Pike Place and she was already starting her employees off at $22/hr.
Your business plan is flawed if it relies on paying people less than minimum wage.
NYP has a narrative they want to project and shape the story to fit that narrative.
i feel like this is still rich corporate americas fault. SO many years of doing nothing about wages to keep profits up while the cost of everything just didn’t stop going up. So new business’s get in on the whole “oh i only need to pay X wages right?” idea and then when the system can’t support people actually working to live it all falls apart.
If wages could stay so much the same for so long, prices of goods could have too, the whole system is just the big corps dragging everything to themselves cause screw the little guys we got ours
Utter BS. It was $19.76/hr in 2024 and has gone up just $1/hr to $20.76. If $1/hr breaks her, then she was going to go under anyways.
I work in a restaurant management software company. I’ve seen a lot of restaurants come and go. Sometimes it’s because they go bankrupt by thats actually somewhat rare. Most of the time it’s not because they don’t make money but because the owner is tired of working 12 hour days because they can’t figure out how to work smarter instead of harder.
Yeah, if $50-100 in additional wages a day are what makes you need to shut down, you weren’t far away from shutting down before the minimum wage increase.
This lady owned a business and was personally taking home less than minimum wage?
Why doesn’t she just go work for $20 an hour for someone else? Surely that will fix all her problems.
I have eaten at this waffle shop once and never wanted to go back. She was a miserable human and I felt bad for the employees. Love supporting small business but not when the owner is a dickhead.
Imagine if small businesses like this were being consistently subsidized by the government instead of the banks and shit that have to get bailed out for billions every few decades. I mean, also eat shit for being mad about having to pay your workers, but you get the idea.
It’s not small business fault.
If big business paid enough, small business would have enough customers to generate enough to pay the living wage.
People that don’t own a business have no idea that the operational costs have gone up as fast as literally everything else we pay for. Going from $7500/mo for rent to almost $10k for small nail salon type places around me. Utilities and insurances take the same hike along with materials and supplies. Yet customers won’t come back if you raise the price. To offset the increase in material costs alone you have to raise prices. Can’t operate at a loss… now you need to add way more in costs for employees yet we can’t raise the price of the products according to public. Where does the money come from?
How exactly do we manage? If you have to pay several thousand more every month and we’re already check to check (likely 75%+ of small businesses in USA) what is the fkn solution?