Doing just fine
Earlier this month,
Seattle Magazine put up an article posing the question
"Why are so many Seattle restaurants closing lately?" After talking about the natural lifespan of an older establishment and also about how terribly hard it is to have a successful restaurant anywhere, ever, they used about half of the article's ink here:
And for Seattle restaurateurs recently, there is also another key consideration. Though none of our local departing/transitioning restaurateurs who announced their plans last month have mentioned this as an issue, another major factor affecting restaurant futures in our city is the impending minimum wage hike to $15 per hour. Starting April 1, all businesses must begin to phase in the wage increase: Small employers have seven years to pay all employees at least $15 hourly; large employers (with 500 or more employees) have three.
[Bold my emphasis]
Right-wing outlets and people who think that only high school kids and poor people of color should work in the service industry and buy bootstraps picked the story up and ran with it. Well, the Seattle Times decided to find out if any of this was true. It's an important thing to know—is public policy negatively affecting local economy? They went and asked the restauranteurs the article cited—the ones closing their restaurants.
Renee Erickson is closing Boat Street Cafe, her first restaurant, but she runs three others and is in the process of opening two more. Asked in an email about the closure being associated with $15, she replied: “That’s weird, ha. No, that’s not why I’m closing Boat Street. Would have said so.”
Erickson continued, “I’m totally on board with the $15 min. It’s the right thing to do … Opening more businesses would not be smart if I felt it was going to hinder my success.”
That's strange. It doesn't sound like the Seattle Magazine article's assertion at all.
Little Uncle proprietors Poncharee Kounpungchart (who goes by PK) and Wiley Frank are closing one location, having found the space unsuitable after two years, while remaining open on Capitol Hill and considering new opportunities.
“We were never interviewed for these articles and we did not close our … location due to the new minimum wage,” Kounpungchart and Frank said in an email. “We do not know what our colleagues are doing to prepare themselves for the onset of the new law, but pre-emptively closing a restaurant seven years before the full effect of the law takes place seems preposterous to us.”
There are more people mentioned in the article that rebut the article's implications. But in the end the math that is done in
Seattle Mag and the right-wing outlets that ran with the story, is wrong.
Is this an unusual number of restaurant closures for Seattle? In February alone last year, before the Seattle City Council approved the $15 wage, Madison Park Conservatory, Marché, Belle Clementine, Azteca in Ballard and B&O Espresso in Ballard closed. The beginning of the year — after the flurry of dining and drinking and spending of the holidays, with taxes looming — is a tough time for the business. Just two prominent closures in Seattle in February could be interpreted as a sign of restaurant industry health. Indeed, 27 new bars and restaurants opened on Capitol Hill alone in 2014.
A living wage is nothing to be afraid of. It will make everybody's lives better—even the skeptics.