Ahead of what will undoubtedly be a shift for the local food scene, Eater asked Seattle-area restaurant owners to weigh in on the impending wage increase. Here's what Angela Stowell,Brendan McGill, and others have to say about how it might change the dining habits of residents and impact the future of restaurants.
Manu Alfau
Chef/Owner, La Bodega
I wish they would've done a little more research on how it would affect small businesses. I am all for people making more money, but I think it's meant for larger corporations like McDonald's, Target, Walmart to have this wage hike.
I don't think it's a bad thing but for smaller businesses, only the super strong will survive. It will mean that only owners who are willing and able to work every day at their own businesses to reduce labor costs will survive. I also have a five year lease, so I'll be able to make a decision about whether to sign or and go forward or not, but other businesses might not have that.
Jeremy Hardy
Owner, Coastal Kitchen and Mioposto
This is a game changer. The myriad of unintended consequences it too complex to really understand; even for restaurant veterans. There was incredible anger generated by a series of callous, recession causing, big-bonused bad actors on Wall Street while the rest of us were falling into the recession abyss. Those guys in Wall Street must be chuckling—like the invasion of Iraq the 15Now folks missed the target by about 3,000 miles. But we sit in the crossfire.
As a lifelong liberal I have always been angry when businesses and politicians decry the loss of jobs over a CPI $.40 minimum wage increase because that is ridiculous. This is different. We cannot survive if we continue doing business as usual. I hope the public will continue to support their favorite spots while everybody figures this thing out. We are going to adjust using all of the tools at our disposal; pricing, reducing menu offerings, look at operating hours, reducing labor where we can and certainly not opening another business in our beloved Seattle. Our business model will need to change. In a business whose goal is "to build community one relationship at a time" this reduction in labor is going to make that even more difficult.
We have raised 100's of thousands for schools, Lifelong AIDS Alliance, Mercy Corps, tsunami survivors, Darfur, the victims of Oso, and countless other non-profits over the years while providing health insurance, education reimbursements, and ongoing training for our employees. It falls somewhere between feeling sad and feeling betrayed that this grenade has been dropped on us.
Brendan McGill
Chef/Owner, Hitchcock, Hitchcock Deli
I think what people need to realize is that the money will have to come from somewhere. With a group like mine, where ethics in sourcing come before profits, we run a very slim margin. To pay my staff more, I need to either buy worse food or raise my prices, and I'm not willing to start buying commodity meats or fish from larger, questionably managed fisheries.
I'm supportive of livable wages and am honestly somewhat excited for this social experiment. If one hour of minimum wage can be used as a metric, things will go fine. If a roast beef sandwich made with high quality bread, hormone and antibiotic-free beef and aioli with organic and free range eggs now costs about one hour of minimum wage, my estimate is that after the wage hikes it will still cost about one hour of minimum wage. There seems to be a fallacy that instead of lining our richie-rich pockets, business owners will simply break off a little more for their employees. I barely get paid $15 an hour.
And the thing is, most of my employees already make $15 an hour, if not much more in the servers' case—it may be a base of $10-$14, plus tips from the pool, staff meals, or vacation pay. Without those factors being considered and fighting to stay in the black (as if every restaurant isn't perpetually fighting to stay in the black), we won't be able to show our staff the respect of allowing them an espresso drink whenever they're dragging, or to use the same high-quality foods for staff meals that we offer our guests. I've enjoyed not running a corporate ship the way the large hotels I've worked in operate: highly punitive where cost-control is concerned. For them it's about maximizing profits, but for me it's going to be about staying in business.
Angela Stowell
CFO/Owner, Ethan Stowell Restaurants
We fully support an increase of the minimum wage to $15, however, we feel that all W2 income should be considered when calculating that wage. Restaurants work on very small margins and Washington already has the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.32 an hour. Under this plan, servers and bartenders, who already make an average of $35-$40 and hour in W2 income, will see an immediate increase in their pay while the cooks, who make around $15 an hour, will have stagnant wages for upwards of seven years.
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