Talk about being a lazy sack of shit.
Chairman of the Lampasas Democratic Party (SDEC-24 TX) Clayton Tucker makes a habit of posting ridiculous garbage without ever asking the obvious questions that a normal person would ask. You’d think a chick who spends her entire day on the Internet would dig into things a little bit, but you’d be wrong. It’s all about cliches and platitudes for the tiny, envious socialist brain:
Who is Alec Stapp? We’ll get to that. But for now, just know that he is ANOTHER 32-year-old idiot who has never worked in the private sector and has never owned or managed a business – let alone a restaurant. He’s a “thinker” who lives in Washington D.C. In other words, he is a parasitic grifter socialist worm….just like Clayton Tucker.
So on to the obvious questions a REAL thinker like myself would ask: What’s the name of this restaurant? How are their finances? How much are they raising prices to pay for this? When was the pay hike implemented? What is the old wage and the new wage? How many workers are affected?
Luckily, I am here to do all the REAL work, because I like to get the whole picture. I’m not a moron socialist who just posts one-liners all day long like “we need to pay everyone a living wage,” or “no child should ever be hungry.”
I live in the real world…as do the people who run restaurants and the people who eat at them. So here are some facts:
The restaurant in questions is called Pollo Tropical and they are a Florida chain. I myself was born and raised in South Florida and have never heard of this chain, so that makes me wonder about some things.
The first thing I learned, is they are a shit company whose stock (FRGI) has been destroyed by about 86% over the last few years. So the one thing they HAVE accomplished is bending shareholders over and making them bleed from the anus:
Socialist retards like Clayton Tucker and Alec Stapp probably don’t know this, but that little dash in front of the 5.03 MILLION means NEGATIVE. As in, they lost five million bucks on over $400 million of revenue.
That is not good.
We also learn that they have raised prices a lot recently and will raise them AGAIN next month to pay for these generous wages. The raises JUST happened, so it would make sense that we need to see how this restaurant is doing a year from now – because they might just be out of business. Which means all those workers would have a salary of $0.
So in addition to the 17% price increases from last year and this year, they are tacking on ANOTHER 6% next month.
Once you raise the price of a shitty chicken sandwich to $17.00 or so, people tend to say “no thanks” and pretty soon you are out of business.
FURTHERMORE, this chain has a LOT of locations around Miami. How many undocumented Cubans and Haitians do you think they have in the kitchen washing dishes for $10/hr cash under the table? As someone who has worked in several kitchens in his life (as opposed to Clayton Tucker and Alec Stapp who have never worked ANYWHERE) I can guarantee you there are more than a few.
As for the “boost in pay” they are giving out: how much of a boost? Did you raise it from $9/hr to $11/hr? Because that’s still pretty much a shit wage. Naturally, NONE of the articles about this magnanimous company makes mention of cold, hard numbers or facts. Just feel-good bullshit that simpletons like Tucker and Stapp can re-post and point to and say “SEE?!? It works!”
Unfortunately, the reality is always more like THIS little story:
Or maybe THESE stories:
Wage hikes force large-scale restaurant closings, study finds
Minimum-wage hikes do close restaurants. Just not the ones you care about.
Minimum Wage Hikes Kill Yet Another Restaurant in 2022
But why take the word of actual restaurant owners? I’m sure unemployed parasites who have never even seen the inside of the restaurant business (like Tucker and Stapp) are SO much more knowledgeable than those people that actually RAN restaurants for decades.
What Tucker and Stapp can just NEVER understand (but what I learned in second grade) is There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (TANSTAAFL). When the cost of your inputs spikes drastically (labor, electricity, insurance, cost of good sold, etc) you have two choices: raise prices to pay for it or close your doors. The more you raise your prices, the less demand you will see for your product. Again – there is a limit to what people will pay for a shitty chicken sandwich.
Contrary to what morons like Tucker and Stapp believe, the restaurant business operates on razor thin margins. That’s why 60% of them fail in the first year and 80% of them are out of business within five years of opening.
These aren’t “fat cat greedy owners” who are hogging millions to themselves and refuse to pay a decent wage. If you do an honest accounting, most small business owners make LESS money on an hourly basis than a lot of their employees. Tucker and Stapp don’t know this either, because they are do-nothing clowns who post Tweets for a “living” and have mommy to live with.
SO – the post shown above about them “boosting wages” and making it “work” is complete bullshit for now. We’ll see where they are next December.
[Oh – did I mention that Pollo Tropical has ALREADY closed THIRTY of their restaurants? That means the hundreds and hundreds of workers in THOSE restaurants now get $0 per hour from Pollo Tropical. TANSTAAFL baby!]