I’m sure some liberals out there who have never run a business themselves think this restaurant owner is just doing it wrong.
President Obama’s election victory ensured his Affordable Care Act would remain the centerpiece of his first term in power – but that has left some business owners baulking at the extra cost Obamcare will bring.>
Florida based restaurant boss John Metz, who runs approximately 40 Denny’s and owns the Hurricane Grill & Wings franchise has decided to offset that by adding a five percent surcharge to customers’ bills and will reduce his employees’ hours.
With Obamacare due to be fully implemented in January 2014, Metz has justified his move by claiming it is ‘the only alternative. I’ve got to pass on the cost to the customer.’
Go ahead, liberals. Boycott him. Try your hand at destroying even more livelihoods.
Obamacare requires businesses or franchises with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker over 30 workers.
The program mandates that only employees working more than 30 hours a week are covered under their employers health insurance plan, chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are already considering reduced worker hours.
‘Obviously, I’d love to cover all our employees under that insurance,’ said Metz.
‘But to pay $5,000 per employee would cost us $175,000 per restaurant and unfortunately, most of our restaurants don’t make $175,000 a year. I can’t afford it.’
Obviously he’s just an evil capitalist exploiting the labor of others.
Love it. And have the waitresses & waiters complain about cut hours. See and hear what you voted for twice.
Every medical billing company in the United States should adopt the same. A special line charge for
Obamacare Surcharge: $xx,xxx.xx
If he was in another jurisdiction up north like NYC, this would be the “fatty tax” and go into who-knows-where. I think most customers would put up with it, so long as the particular Dennys’ workforce looked more like a Starbucks and not like a Dunkin Donuts or _______ Tacqueria. This might be a good time to re-introduce forms of the Fair Tax and wind down if not wholly eliminate the federal income tax in the same legislation. At least this “surcharge” is based on visually-verifiable consumption. As far as the waiters and waitresses, this will kill ther tips in the short term.
what is this denny’s you speak of?
besides it’s all halliburtonbush’s fault
– the proverbial silver lining to the miserable and now permanent regime in D.C. Taunt after you’ve eaten so they won’t spit in your food.
Americans have a long history of flocking to pay highly arbitrary inflated prices for everything under the sun so Denny’s flock will continue the american tradition regardless of any underlying political issue.
The beauty of his plan is that it makes the costs of ObamaCare visible to customers. Make it a dedicated line on the receipt. The government loves to raise taxes and fees on businesses. When those costs just get rolled into the prices, people complain about the greedy business owners. They should add more line items to the receipt. Some items could be business taxes, regulatory costs and other things that get passed on to consumers as stealth taxes. Remove the cloak and let people see what government is really costing them. Some economists calculate that 40-60% of the price of everything we buy is passed along business taxes and regulatory compliance costs.
Great points but contrary to the nature of an overwhelming majority of americans today. Most never look at an itemized receipt — just the total (maybe) and pull out that plastic credit card.
Assuming for a moment that your idea would have any great influence, the greatest line on an invoice or receipt should be one indicating the arbitrary inflation created by labor union demands on the pricing. Then post that percentage at the entry doors of all businesses just like a health inspection score for restaurants.
Nothing works for everyone but if we can start getting enough people to notice how much government is costing us, perhaps things can change someday. I’ve seen some gas stations that post the amount of taxes per gallon. We need more transparency on things like this. The politicians and bureaucrats would scream but they like being able to do their dirty work without getting any of the blame for the harm they cause.
Could you imagine getting a receipt from a restaurant that listed the cost of the items ordered and then listed the other costs that go into the final price? For example, for a $12 steak you might see something like this (purely made up example):
Steak – $6
Regulatory overhead – $3
Business Taxes – $3
I’d still like to see the unions cost factors of feed production/logistics, processing/logistics and union costs retail to the end user.
http://www.circlevmeat.com/prices.html
Just imagine if we still had independent meat processors in our local communities utilizing local and regional meat suppliers along with more regional processors to meet the regular regional retail demand.
So the end result of this is that these employees will get their free healthcare thru either expanded Medicaid (138% of “poverty” level) or the subsidized exchange (subsidized to cost no more than set % of income, probably around 3-5% for most Dennys employees). In exchange for this, they will either need to find a second part-time job, or accept 28 hr or less work week pay as the new norm.
Of course, allowing people who don’t have insurance offered at work to pool across state lines into a large group to get the same price advantages as employer group insurance and then get the same tax treatment could have solved much of this a long time ago. I believe the Democrats were always the ones standing in the way of that. They needed these people uninsured to use as the pretext for Obamacare. So now, they’ll have somthing similar to that in the exchanges, but at the cost of a full-time job. And the Dems will tell them how grateful they should be for it.
Maybe most businesses and industries will get smart and use terminate contract (1099) labor. Contract labor is already common place in America so the transition wouldn’t be to difficult for most industry sectors. If labor unions get in the way move your business and equipment to a right to work state or to another shore.
The restaurant business is one of the most cut-throat out there. The failure rate is enormous and the margin small.
I hope Denny’s clearly spells out that it’s an ObamaCare surcharge.