I'm a California restaurant operator preparing for the $20-an-hour fast-food wage by trimming hours, eliminating employee vacation, and raising menu prices

They really offered 2 possible outcomes:

• Increase prices
• Fire people

Why not just . . . make less money?

The increase was $4. The article kept using percentages to make it seem like some big scary change, but the increase is 1 meal per hour per worker. I'm pretty sure any half decent restaurant can handle that extra $4 per worker hourly.

But no, the solution is clearly to just nuke your vacation policy so you can save $1000 per worker per year. Yeah okay.

Notice how he wouldn't be tightening his belt so that workers can have a better wage.

"Eliminating employee vacation"

His workers had an average 48 hours of yearly vacation time. That is not vacation time.

What trash

Mark owns fatburger franchises and he and his family are BARELY scraping by... They only took two European vacations last year and their kid that just turned 16 had to get a tesla instead of electric Porsche? It's just not sustainable and this ASSAULT needs to stop or hard working vampires like Mark and his loved ones suffer.

Edit: oh, that's weird... Autocorrect formed "families" into "vampires".

Never once crossed his mind to take less from the top. American businesses should fail more often.

Boohoo, a capitalist that owns 4 restaurants is passing the costs of labor on to their customers and is still blaming us for it. Sounds like the playbook of an abuser.

If paying people what they are worth causes businesses to fail, then that is just Daddy Capitalism working right?

"how will I buy my next four franchises if I have to pay my employees a living wage?"

Lol, 48 hours of paid time off. I don't even work full time and get 120 hours, by law. Fuck the US.

eliminating employee vacation

Man shut the fuck up, the only employee that got a vacation was you numbnuts

If a business cannot survive paying its employees a liveable wage then it should not exist. Businesses that do not pay a livable wage but can afford to are exploiting its employees.

TLDR: “Hey, everybody. I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells, and I like to kiss my own butt.”

If you’re in L.A. Make sure to boycott Fatburger.

The paid vacation he's eliminating was capped at 72hrs per year. He warns that high schoolers will have a tough time competing with more valuable employees, but this is due to the wage increase only applying to fast food. Also, the big layoffs in in-house delivery are similarly due to the narrow scope of the law which excludes gig workers.

"Landlords won't lower their rents"-- these things take time.

If you can't do business in CA, then don't. OR treat your employees like shit. Sure.

Eliminating employee vacation, as though he was already offering them some extravagant amount of paid time off. And what does he think cutting hours will accomplish? You either have enough people working the store, or you don't. Running a skeleton crew and overworking your people isn't going to be sustainable, not when literally every other fast food place is paying at least as much as you and they have choices.

In N Out in California pays $20 or more an hour starting wages, their burgers are (IIRC) less than $5, and they still make a shit ton of money.

Oh no! What will those poor employees do now that they can work at literally any fast food chain for $20/hr!

The new California law doesn't apply to employees at full-service chains such as Chili's or Cheesecake Factory.

That's really strange. A minimum wage for just fast food?

Defending scamming as a business model isn’t a business model.

I REALLY want to see the last few years of profit margins that these asshats are earning that are so vital to maintain that they are “forced” to pass the financial hit on to their workers (who are doing ALL the actual work). "If the minimum wage goes up, they either have to increase prices so that they can cover the increased expenses for labor, or they're going to have to consolidate their labor and let people go," Lederman told BI. Thanks Lederman, you tone deaf douchnozzle. Why can’t they earn slightly less profits so everyone can, I dunno, live their fucking lives?

Ok, then show us your books or I'll assume you are full of shit

Good, pay a livable wage and ditch tips

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

He should probably just close his stores, saving the public from ever accidentally ingesting his disgusting food.

Two Pizza Hut franchisees, who own hundreds of stores in California, are eliminating their in-house delivery fleets. The labor-gutting strategy has left 1,200 drivers without jobs

Sooo....are they going to rely on Doordash and Uber Eats exclusively? Doesn't that come with significant uncertainty? Isn't this guaranteed to result in fewer orders being fulfilled?

Hope this dude goes under and never recovers.

The is a poor excuse and will cause lost of business because this guy wants all the money, not just some.

Down goes neoliberalism. Wages go up and so does business whenever minimum wage goes up.

If I cry harder I will be the real victim mentality.

Friendly reminder that the "restaurants have razor thin margins!" is a lie. Their margins might seem slim, but doing huge amounts of sales means big money.

Hey everyone, look at me! I'm a total piece of shit!

Oh boo fucking hoo. I think OP just posted this to piss people off. Worked, at least a little, on me.

Fuck Door Dash.

These assholes ripped me off for over $90 dollars.

Then their automated system called me and woke me up at 1:30 am to ask me about my customer service experience.

I would drink poison before I ever did business with these shit sucking assholes again.

Prices are based on supply and demand, neither of which involves employee wages, so this guy is lying about the reason. Wages affect profit. If a company is increasing prices, it's because they think demand will support it. This guy can lie to his customers for a bit saying it's because of the wage increases to try to squeeze something out of people, but ultimately, people will start buying somewhere else and he'll need to lower prices again to balance demand.

The other things, trimming hours and denying vacation, are things they constantly do, with or without wage hikes, so again, he's lying about the reason.

Fun facts:

• fast food margins are really thin. Not razor thin, but very thin
• the biggest single outlay is labour. It's a huge percentage, and I remember it to be like 35% of costs
• a 25% bump is not insignificant to the biggest cost with margins so thin

I invite someone with more recent time in fast food who knows better to correct me. My experience is 25 years old and I only got as high as shift manager before I got a better job related to my field.