Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC voted for a law that increased the cost of doing business for restaurants by a double-digit percentage and now is shocked that restaurants are closing. The white mediocrities who were behind this are all like, "Hmmm, it's probably greedy landlords" while most restaurants are in the middle of their 10-year leases when they close, with a locked-in price for five more years.

I hope everyone enjoys the future of dining out in DC: Ultra-fancy restaurants or take-out. There will be no in-between because of I-82.

This is nonsense disseminated by the restaurant lobby. The law imposes no such costs.

Are you really this stupid?

https://x.com/JHWeissmann/status/1918321448533340256

Ooh a twitter link. She's got us on the run now friends!

Paying employees is ONE part of running a business. Pay them well, you'll get the best talent, and your customers will return.

I'll pay for good service. I won't pay to have to read fine print and suss out the scam fees while having to wave my empty glass in the air hoping against hope some surly employee might refill it.

Restaurant owners did this to themselves. This is the FO result of FA.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC voted for a law that increased the cost of doing business for restaurants by a double-digit percentage and now is shocked that restaurants are closing. The white mediocrities who were behind this are all like, "Hmmm, it's probably greedy landlords" while most restaurants are in the middle of their 10-year leases when they close, with a locked-in price for five more years.

I hope everyone enjoys the future of dining out in DC: Ultra-fancy restaurants or take-out. There will be no in-between because of I-82.

This is nonsense disseminated by the restaurant lobby. The law imposes no such costs.

Are you really this stupid?

https://x.com/JHWeissmann/status/1918321448533340256

Anonymous wrote:Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

If restaurants want to keep their skilled workers, they should pay them more. They presumably do this for chefs, what makes it so hard for them to pay good servers higher wages?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone who supported Initiative 82 is a moron who doesn't know a single person in the restaurant industry. Such a short sighted idiotic path. I'm so sick of people coming in and thinking they know better than the people that are actually affected.

Or, we worked in restaurants in California, Oregon or another state without a tipped minimum, made the standard minimum wage plus tips, and watched restaurants thrive.

Restaurant owners brought this on themselves with all their whining and backdoor politicking and sneaky add-ons. I and lots of people I know stopped eating out because of the way restaurant owners behaved in their attempt to screw their own workers.

Exactly. I am a DC resident and avoid eating out in the city whenever possible because I expect that all the shady shit being pulled by restaurant managers will just make me mad and paying good money to get mad is not something I hanker after. I will 100% never eat out in the city again if the restaurant industry succeeds in its efforts to overturn the will of an overwhelming majority of DC voters.

Anonymous wrote:DC voted for a law that increased the cost of doing business for restaurants by a double-digit percentage and now is shocked that restaurants are closing. The white mediocrities who were behind this are all like, "Hmmm, it's probably greedy landlords" while most restaurants are in the middle of their 10-year leases when they close, with a locked-in price for five more years.

I hope everyone enjoys the future of dining out in DC: Ultra-fancy restaurants or take-out. There will be no in-between because of I-82.

This is nonsense disseminated by the restaurant lobby. The law imposes no such costs.

Anonymous wrote:None of my hospitality friends supported this law. They all say they’re making less money than they used to working at high end or high volume venues. It should be repealed. We have too many emotion-driven voters (and politicians) in this city.

Public policy should not be dictated by your “hospitality friends”. It should be determined by the general interest.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone who supported Initiative 82 is a moron who doesn't know a single person in the restaurant industry. Such a short sighted idiotic path. I'm so sick of people coming in and thinking they know better than the people that are actually affected.

Anyone who thinks that public policy should be dictated by narrow economic interests - in this case, restaurant owners and wait staff - either belongs to those narrow economic interests or is a moron.

Kind of surprised the morons didn't wait until every last restaurant in the city had closed before considering that maybe, possibly, perhaps Initiative 82, in fact, was a profoundly stupid policy.

Right because there are no restaurants in Europe, Canada, or Australia, right? How can restaurants possibly be expected to make a profit without customers directly paying the lion’s share of the costs for their wait staff!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

That is simply false. People who eat out still tip 20%+. Read Tom Sietsema's WP chat. The anecdata is universal.

What happened was that restaurant owners got greedy and thought they could dupe the public into paying a ton of made-up fees. And so a lot of us stopped eating out.

I don't know about that. At the end of the day, I don't want a bunch of restaurants closing and seeing empty storefronts.

DP. I have zero interest in propping up restaurants that can't find a way to turn a profit by simply charging customers the real cost of their food and drinks.

DC should 100% be taxing landlords for empty storefronts if they refuse to lower the rents enough to make a business like the one I just described feasible.

People do not need to be held hostage by the restaurant industry. Eating out is supposed to be an enjoyable leisure activity, not some kind of ad-hoc welfare system for waiters.

Amen.

And it can't be said enough: this system exists AND WORKS in other high-cost cities. I made a perfectly nice living waiting tables in California, earning the state minimum wage and typical tips for the time. (It was 15% back then.) The restaurant owners did just fine too, judging by their cars and lifestyles.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

That is simply false. People who eat out still tip 20%+. Read Tom Sietsema's WP chat. The anecdata is universal.

What happened was that restaurant owners got greedy and thought they could dupe the public into paying a ton of made-up fees. And so a lot of us stopped eating out.

I don't know about that. At the end of the day, I don't want a bunch of restaurants closing and seeing empty storefronts.

DP. I have zero interest in propping up restaurants that can't find a way to turn a profit by simply charging customers the real cost of their food and drinks.

DC should 100% be taxing landlords for empty storefronts if they refuse to lower the rents enough to make a business like the one I just described feasible.

People do not need to be held hostage by the restaurant industry. Eating out is supposed to be an enjoyable leisure activity, not some kind of ad-hoc welfare system for waiters.

Anonymous wrote:Anyone who supported Initiative 82 is a moron who doesn't know a single person in the restaurant industry. Such a short sighted idiotic path. I'm so sick of people coming in and thinking they know better than the people that are actually affected.

And all the people in the restaurant industry who cried foul over Initiative 82 is a moron who didn't understand that people were rebelling against a lack of price transparency in the restaurant industry post-Covid and latching onto anything that they thought might keep restaurants from gouging by posting one set of prices and then quietly adding three different fees to the bill after the fact.

When the I82 conversation was happening, I kept pointing this out to people in the industry. The number one response? "Well we have to do it that way because if we just baked the costs into pricing, people would be put off by the higher prices and wouldn't eat/drink here."

So literally the goal is to trick customers into coming in and ordering by lying about prices, and then force them to pay extra later. So weird that people didn't like that.

I also remember before I82 was voted on, I had multiple servers at restaurants tell me that I should tip them the standard 20% even though the the restaurant was already charging a 15-18% service fee on my bill because, they explained, they didn't get any of that service fee. So I went to those restaurants and then while I was there, my waiter informed me I would essentially need to tip 35-40% on my bill because the owner would extract money for "service" but not share it with the servers (no way for me to verify this info, btw) but then the server will apparently starve to death if I don't throw another 20% on top of that. Oh and haha you should calculate that extra 20% for tip on the total AFTER the service fee. Unless you're cheap -- are you cheap?

The restaurant industry in DC has only itself to blame for this mess, sorry. Well also landlords who price gouge restaurants on rents because a vacant storefront offers them a tax benefit so they are insufficiently incentivized to market price commercial spaces.

But you know who isn't to blame? Customers and taxpayers who just want to know how much food and drinks will cost before they order them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

That is simply false. People who eat out still tip 20%+. Read Tom Sietsema's WP chat. The anecdata is universal.

What happened was that restaurant owners got greedy and thought they could dupe the public into paying a ton of made-up fees. And so a lot of us stopped eating out.

I don't know about that. At the end of the day, I don't want a bunch of restaurants closing and seeing empty storefronts.

Anonymous wrote:Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

That is simply false. People who eat out still tip 20%+. Read Tom Sietsema's WP chat. The anecdata is universal.

What happened was that restaurant owners got greedy and thought they could dupe the public into paying a ton of made-up fees. And so a lot of us stopped eating out.

Because servers don't want it.

My brother is a professional bartender in DC who routinely makes tips that equal out $50-$60/hr. A slow night for him is leaving with only ~$250 in tips. He makes $600-$800 per night Thur-Sat.

People aren't going to tip with a high hourly wage in place, and no one who has been in the service industry as a career is going to keep doing it for $17.95/hr.

Service industry workers and restaurant owners tried to tell TPTB that a higher minimum wage would not work for all establishments. For a McDonald's? Sure, but at Le Diplomate, Zaytinya, or The Hamilton, nope. They can't keep their skilled workers at that rate.

Anonymous wrote:Anyone who supported Initiative 82 is a moron who doesn't know a single person in the restaurant industry. Such a short sighted idiotic path. I'm so sick of people coming in and thinking they know better than the people that are actually affected.

Or, we worked in restaurants in California, Oregon or another state without a tipped minimum, made the standard minimum wage plus tips, and watched restaurants thrive.

Restaurant owners brought this on themselves with all their whining and backdoor politicking and sneaky add-ons. I and lots of people I know stopped eating out because of the way restaurant owners behaved in their attempt to screw their own workers.

Anonymous wrote:Tipped wage, marijuana decriminalization, excessive bike lanes, and defunding the police have made DC incredibly hostile to businesses.

This is not what has made DC hostile to businesses. Bike lanes are great. When DC required that we stop providing subsidies for parking (dumbest law ever), at least my young employees can bike to work.

My organization has 150 employees downtown. What makes DC hostile is red tape. It's more expensive to have a business here. No one has to be in DC. We could move to VA and it would be easier and cheaper. Everyone thinks that there is this "business elite" and they have so much money they can waste millions of dollars trying to navigate DC.

Initiative 82 is stupid. DC needs to be more business friendly. If you don't like it, move.