Posted on 01/10/2019 3:40:16 PM PST by lowbridge
As much as we all want to believe this story I have my doubts. Restaurants are constantly raising price, so a 10% increase in labor costs should not send them broke.
How come all the other restaurants aren’t closing as well? I bet this restaurant has been going down for years, unwilling to adapt to changing tastes.
You probably can sell it as old school counterculture and get the zoomers in there.
I too visited more than once during my time at the 'tute. We always enjoyed the waitresses. They always had a bit of "attitude". Back in those days waiting two hours to get in was common. Times change.
I remember the indian pudding.
“Looks pretty crappy to me....”
Ditto that.
The same thing is happening in Seattle with the rising minimum wage.
Two or three years ago we went with a large group to a seafood restaurant near the Seattle waterfront (tourist area). One of the men in our group was a regular at the restaurant and commented to the waitress that the prices had gone up yet again. She proudly proclaimed the price increase was because the diners no longer had to leave a tip as the prices included all of the servers’ pay and that the customers were actually saving money now. When she left, he mused at her math as the prices were about 30% higher and the typical tip was 20% of the bill, so how were the customers saving money?
The restaurant closed last year and in a newspaper article the owner said he increased prices due to the minimum wage law. As a result of the price hike, fewer customers came and his revenues dropped. He could no longer pay the bills and the staff with the drop in customers and the increase in wages. The restaurant workers, instead of getting $12/hr or $15/hr, were going to get $0/hr!
I don’t think this is an isolated development with the $15 movement.
No scrod?
You expect me to believe that a 1 dollar rise in the minimum wage cased this. Riiiiiiiiight.
Mom & dad took me there for my first big-boy meal at a restaurant when I was about 7 years old. The place is almost 200 years old, but it’s really old-timey.....the younger crowd is not keen on it.
Boston is thriving & this place is finding it difficult to fit in. Boston is a young city (major college town) and with the new Seaport section of the city growing Durgin Park is fading away. It’s owned by a group out of NYC...no local skin in the game. Makes it easier for them to close it down.
He mentions other causes further down in the article.
.
Don’t believe this story. The staff probably all made more than minimum. It is a trash main street feel good story posted by a Cheap Labor Bush League globalist Free Traitor™ Freeper.
I suspect you’re provably right about the decline. But, the min wage increases hurt the weakest ones first. They raise the threshold required for any business to survive.
Just taken on face value, it appears profit margins have been dwindling for various reasons for the last few years, so recent mandates to increase labor costs put him into the “unprofitable” realm.
It appears to have been a triple-whammy on the fellow. Increased facility overhead, stiffer competition and higher labor costs (wage mandates and health care mandates) made him decide that he wasn’t in business to lose money.
It’s not a new phenomenon in the business world, especially in the food services category. What’s surprising is that he (family) was able to last as long as he did, it seems to me.
They raise the wage and cut the crew by one. Make the rest take up the slack. In the long run they make out.
They run the business into the ground and blame the minimum wage staff. What reprobates.
I’ll take a “timeworn” establishment any day of the week, over the modern characterless crap that passes for “cultural enlightenment” these days. I want real people - not the phony fetid millennial rot that has infected American society, since those ignorant bags of puss came on the scene.
That’s not the issue. In a difficult environment for his particular business, forcing him to increase operating costs was a “last straw” (it sounds like). Declining gross revenue numbers PLUS an expensive historic building needing upkeep PLUS increased labor costs.....
The restaurant industry generally has a very high failure rate of businesses. It is difficult to make a decent profit in many locales/circumstances, and any change in the balance sheet can be perilous.
Not if you knew to go up the backstairs to the bar and buy a drink. Then they seated you pretty much right away.
ML/NJ
I was born in and raised near Boston. Went to a school of nursing and worked there a year -—— but never went to Durgin-Park. always meant to— to see what people were talking about, but never did go there.
My favorite restaurant was Locke Ober’s off Tremont, off
Winter street. It was a former men’s club and the only way you could eat in the upstairs restaurant, if you were female, was if you were accompanied by a male. Wonder how that would work now-a-days??!! They had a Lobster Savannah as one of their specialties, and it was the best dish in the world!! They closed a few years ago. Sigh.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.