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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Correction. You can have a business. You just have to be the only employee.
I wonder if the NY Post will be as sensational about all the businesses that close because of high tariffs.
Just kidding. They won’t.
While I get you should be able to provide your employees a livable wage… Why can’t we try to bring down the price of living. Inflation doesn’t explain why rent prices have doubled where I lived.
I just came across this article and it further explains:
>[Small employers with 500 or fewer workers had to pay $18.69 per hour if the company did not contribute at least $2.19 per hour toward medical benefits or if the employee did not earn sufficient tips to meet a combined minimum compensation of $20.28.](https://nypost.com/2025/01/02/business/seattle-waffle-shop-shuts-down-due-to-new-minimum-wage-law/)
It seems she decided against contributing the $2.19 towards her employee’s healthcare and opted to shut down the shop instead. I find it hard to believe that a waffle shop would have more than 500 employees. This article is an anti-living wage hit piece. Don’t take the bait.
edit: Who mobilized the anti-living wage troll farm into action? 🙄
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Living wage” needs to be drastically redefined. Companies who decide they only have to provide just enough for ppl to meet the bare minimum to stay alive is wild. Here’s your low wage, highly stressful job that enables you to live in a piece of shit home that is an offensive amount per month, with your shitty car that takes you to the grocery store to only be able to buy shitty food that doesn’t help your health, which you can’t even properly take care of with your shitty healthcare plan that you can’t even use yet bc of your $300 a month plan that’s only that low because you had to lie about your income bc even tho you’re broke, you’re still somehow above the income threshold along with the $8,000 premium. That is not living. That is struggling to have room in your life to even wonder what happiness feels like. They should be called “Don’t die so you can come back to work tomorrow” wages. Full stop.
I call shenanigans. If this law went into effect Jan 1 and this story is Jan 2, did she really have the time to feel the effects or is this a convenient excuse to close an already failing business?
There’s a cafe downstairs from where I live,the food is awesome but they have to pay their workers the state minimum wage which just went up to 15.86 and guess what they didn’t go out of business or raise their prices, they have a solid following and tips are optional the place is doing great, so if they Mr Mike can do it anybody can, I run a tab there (so do most of the people in the building, it’s really convenient not to have to cook breakfast) and at $9 a head it’s not a bad price for a solid meal
The people I know who put in the most work are the dudes who own roach coaches. I took a gig subbing for them one summer and it’s long, brutal hours with no helpers.
Those are the kind of small business owners I can get behind.
It’s a non viable business then, since staff wages are a business cost. Is she complaining that raw material costs are too high? What about rent, utilities, insurance? No, it’s the greedy employees, the poorest people involved in the whole process and the ones that run the fucking business for her that are the ones at fault.
This is the fundamental problem in this country the cost of living has so far exceeded the working class wage that life is becoming to expensive to live and work in..we continue to fall further and further behind with no end in sight..meanwhile when big brother gets in over their head we are expected to bail them out
I’ll never forget a failing restaurant in my hometown. The food quality dropped, the hours grew sporadic, table service took forever. What was once a weekly stop soon faded away. Clinton had barely moved into the White House and a sign on the door read something like:
“Closed due to Clintonomics. He’s raising the minimum wage and we’re closing. We can no longer afford to offer the same quality service you’ve come to know from [I can’t even remember the name] and are regretfully closing our doors. If your children cry because they can’t come here anymore [it was child focused family place] tell them Clinton and the Dems ruined the country and this family owned business.”
NYpost is fucking trash
Anyone using the post as s legitimate news source is comical. They’re top tier rage baiters
I always refer them to this quote:
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Waffle Shop is on a corner space in a small business district of a wealthy neighborhood in a wealthy city. The blame for the business failure is the higher min wage.
Why does no one talk about her high rent? The landlord could reduce the lease payments and keep a decade long good tenant.
The minimum wage had a inflationary wage increase. How much was the landlords inflationary rent increase.?
Well, how the fuck do they have so many non-chain restaurants in Europe, or anywhere else where restauranteurs have to pay their people a living wage?
And how the fuck is it cheaper to eat out in Europe?
Riddle me that, Waffle Lady and New York Grosst
The article blames high inflation , wfh and an increase of minimum wage by 4 dollars for her closing.
Most of it is if not enough tips are earned to meet the minimum, and health care premiums.
But instead of pointing out the ridiculous inflation caused by corporate greed, they blame the minimum wage in the title.
They should just work harder or maybe pull up their bootstraps.
That’s absolutely true. Your dreams should come to fruition on the backs of exploited staff.
Who in this thread is an actual business owner??
Won’t somebody think about the poor business owners, lol. These articles cater so heavily towards this idea that greedy poor people fucked over a hard working boot strap bill and it’s just disgusting.
I have a buddy who runs his own business being sub contractor that helps small businesses with crunching numbers and he told me many years ago that he is exhausted but refused to hire anyone and ran it alone simply because he knew he could not afford to pay them properly.
If your not prepared to work just as hard as your blue collar workers, then you don’t deserve to have a business.
> The flower shop they share the space with is going to online only, so they are taking over the entire space and turning it into an event venue, which the owner has run before. She posted to Facebook about it in November.
Well that’s a totally different thing. From the same thread in regards to the wage increase:
> Hey, not arguing with you. I left out the minimum wage bit bc I’ve also spoken to the owner and I know she supports it, but it’s the internet, so people will assume the worst. Sad thing is usually they’re right – but Coco is a great person and not a part of the problem.
Yet here she is, telling a major news source that it *is* the wage increase (despite being actively hiring when they shuttered, which is a weird choice when you can’t afford to pay people, and still holding onto a now double-sized commercial lot in an expensive part of town, not to mention paying for renovations). That’s not “great person” shit, but it is 100% being part of the fucking problem.
Hopefully she takes the free time she now has to improve her abysmal handwriting
Wages are just like any other business expense. If the price of flour goes up, you wouldn’t accuse farmers of targeting bakeries. Why is it when the money goes to employees, it’s suddenly a tragedy?
If you can’t pay business expenses – your utilities, your perishables, your employees, etc. – you have a failed business. There’s no shame in that. Running a business is really difficult! But, if you cry and moan that somebody else did it, you’re the problem, not your employees.
NY Post is definitely sus.
Small business will suffer and collapse and then we’ll whine there are no more mom and pops
Ya’ll are pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. I blame the insane rent for this mess. The landlords wants to remain anonymous and take the cash to the bank while middle class folks blame and fight each other.
Decoded… “business is terrible and I’ve been looking for the perfect excuse to blame my failures on anything other than myself”
If a small business can’t afford minimum wage…
Oh wait that’s the problem!
The New York Post, of course the article comes from them.
Maybe the business wasn’t going well for whatever reason and now she can blame it on min wage law.
Maybe we need another devastating economic disaster to prove that the minimum wage laws are there to provide a living wage, not to give teenagers an experience.
Wow. One waffle shop shut down to own the libs. Oh, the horror!
Some businesses fail due to poor leadership and a bad business plan.
You have to raise the prices to be able to make the money to pay the higher wages. Raising prices loses customers. Losing customers loses income. No income = no employees = no business.
In an ideal world, that’d be fantastic. However, the world hasn’t been ideal for menial workers for a good decade or more. Cost of living and housing costs and rent have skyrocketed against general wage growth. Governments are largely to blame for not regulating large corporations and housing prices. Thus, most small businesses can’t support a living wage without taking a hit to their general revenue. In a worse case scenario, there is negative revenue. It’s not fair or ideal. It’s just the facts of this shitty shitty life, unfortunately.
This is a problem that is highlighted by the media: people having to close the shop because they have to play a living wage to people. The fact is that the gift of underpaid labor is what keeps those places alive, so maybe they are not that competitive in the first place?
If you cannot afford employees, then you need to either find a way to do all the work yourself or close your business.
Economic theory dictates that there are impacts when you fiddle with the knobs of a “free market.”
I’m this case, it sounds like her problem was more about waffle demand and less about business cost.
A highly rated restaurant in my town recently closed because of a new law requiring businesses with over 25 employees provide health insurance to their employees. God forbid businesses provide proper living standards to employees, sheesh.
who taught her to write her Ps, Ds, and Rs?
But where will people get waffles?!?!
I can see this.. I worked for a very successful restaurant that I loved.. I loved it so much that I was ok with $11.25 an hour as head chef.. until my boss tripled my work load and berated me constantly (he was Hungarian, if you know you know) it sucked and I had to leave.. but I miss it everyday.. the restaurant is gone now.. and I want to start my own.. and be nicer to my employees..
Sounds to me like she wasn’t very good at business to begin with