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the café struggle to pay its workers, part-owner Thad Cummings told local Michigan site MLive, but its Facebook page (no longer active) swelled with comments from angry customers who routinely complained of slow and spotty service, saying that they would sometimes wait nearly an hour for what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 didn’t do a Marxist business properly. The would have done fine if people were forced to patronize the place, and were punished severely if they failed to give glowing praise.
You spent entirely too much time in Woodburn hall. (As did I during the same time period)
That’s the type of place I’d like to walk into——and light a cigarette.
Just because.
.
Don’t forge the special hidden bathrooms for the nomenklatura, that are clean and actually have toilet paper.
I had a near retirement aged professor who worked at a different college in his younger days during the hippy dippy '60s. The admisistration put this exact policy into place. He told my class the program was short lived because the results were exactly as you predicted.
as usual, the brilliant, insightful and hilarious comments on this thread do not disappoint!
Isn’t it amazing how smart people can be so stupid?
In the search box, title option, the single word ‘vegan’ shows two other stories about this. In the search box, title option, the single word ‘marxist’ shows three postings of the story.
Three postings in as many days shouldn’t trouble anyone. A lot of stories get three postings in as many hours.
I often wondered about these Vegan places. I have two idiot sister in laws who are vegans. One of them does it privately and will eat the Christmas ham when she is over. However, the other insists that she drags my brother in law to vegan places.
I think if a vegan place was named “I am a vegan but my Date is not” and serves a balance of bar food and vegan crap, it might work out better.
Since that was a communist place, they should name their burgers after the Communist dictators of the 20th century. The desert would be named “Siberian Labor Camp”
Some people have too much time to think. When that happens, they think of incredibly stupid ideas.
It’s not a Marxist restaurant, unless the government forced them to do it. If it’s a business model they voluntarily choose, then it’s capitalist.
The Salad bar could be named The Potemkin Village.
In a communist businesses, the businesses alway open and shut on time. Well, that is what is written down no matter when it actually opened and closed.
You know, it would be tempting for me to open a mockery of a vegan restaurant with some of these ideas we are discussing.
If only they had more of other people’s money to spend on it.
No, just shocked that it lasted 5 years.
Yeah. What is this workers run the business crap? Any good commie business has a goon squad to enforce workers are on time and busy. Their product may be lousy but they show up and work every day.
Perhaps if some of the workers earned a Hero of Socialist Meal Preparation medal, then production would have improved.
Very well done
A learned freeper
Salute
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