Posted on 12/13/2016 8:43:13 AM PST by Enlightened1
After five years of business, Grand Rapids, Michigan’s famously Marxist vegan sandwich shop is closing its doors due to bumps in the road toward what it hoped would be an egalitarian, worker-run business model. The Garden Diner and Café put Grand Rapids on the alternative diet map thanks to its widely acclaimed vegan, vegetarian, and raw food offerings. Unfortunately, the restaurant also proved the old adage that it doesn’t matter how tasty your black bean patty is if you can’t afford to pay your workers and it takes 45 minutes for you to put a sandwich together.
During its tenure as the Garden Diner and Café—you may know it by its original moniker, the (a little on-the-nose) “Bartertown Diner”—the café prided itself on forgoing a tipping system, paying its employees a living wage, and eschewing the concept of management. The interior of the restaurant even featured a custom mural that showed Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and other famous communist and Marxist revolutionaries performing restaurant work.
Unfortunately, refusing to be a traditional business proved to not be very good for, uh, business.
Not only did the café struggle to pay its workers, part-owner Thad Cummings told local Michigan site MLive, but its Facebook page (no longer active) swelled with comments from angry customers who routinely complained of slow and spotty service, saying that they would sometimes wait nearly an hour for what we’re assuming was a very passable vegan sandwich. And that’s when it was open; thanks to a policy of setting hours by “group decision,” the café didn’t keep standard hours, as some users noted on its (four-star, for what it’s worth) Yelp page.
(Excerpt) Read more at munchies.vice.com ...
They were open at odd hours, working for tips, customers waited up to 40 minutes for a grilled cheese sandwich, and often the staff would get into arguments with customers. Haha!
Any surprise it closed?
How many restaurant workers/members were also assassinated and buried in unmarked graves out in the back?
That’s also the Marxist way.
They were only following the Communist model. Institute a five year plan. Pretend to pay the workers and they pretend to work.
Fail.
Ping, Comrade!
The “hours” thing is a pet peeve of mine. If you open up a retail business and you post specific hours, you are open those hours come hell or high water. If you say you are open until nine, but at 8:45 you’ve not seen a customer in 2 hours, you STILL wait 15 minutes to close the doors.
I moved to rural KY from Seattle about five years ago. I see a lot of businesses that do this “flexible hours” thing. I patronize none of them. I want to know, that if I need a certain tool or part and it’s 5:45 and I can make it to the store by a few minutes before six, their closing time, that they WILL be open, as they say they will be. One time, and I’m done with them.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who has actually had a job.
I remember Professor Hansen from my Poli Sci days at Indiana University in 1979. In his seminar, which should have been called “Soviet Communism Here and Now” he advocated the usual crap about “workers controlling the means of production.” Having worked a real job in commercial construction all summer, I knew his plan had 3 consequences:
1. The building isn’t going to be built
2. Because the Worker’s Committee is going to be convened in the parking lot with a case of beer and a bucket of chicken, and
3. The “means of production” (company tools) are going home with the Workers’ Committee and are not being returned in the morning.
I wish I’d had the balls to suggest to the Professor that students should also control the means of production of grades, that we all vote ourselves A+ grades for the semester, cut the nonsense and reconvene at Nick’s for some cold beer.
I am surprised it lasted five years!
Most five year plans don’t.
“Any surprise it closed?”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?m=all;o=time;q=quick;s=vegan%20restaurant
Oh sure only show the rush hour crowd.
Remember, socialism is still a good idea, it’s just that this time (again), it wasn’t implemented properly.
White power to asparagus?
I think they need to tweak their business model. Start selling ribs, chicken wings, and real hamburgers. Have a burger that weighs 3 lbs, and call it “heart attack” I am sure business will pick up.
What happened? The employees wouldn’t work for free?
If only it was done right.
Thanks I did a search for it before I posted by the title, and it did not come up?
The search engine does not always seem to work.
I actually went to a DMV office at four minutes before closing time and was walking towards the door as the employee inside was walking towards it from the other side. She got there two seconds before me and locked the door in my face, turned, and walked back to the back of the building.
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