Your thoughts are generous indeed, and you’re right that we should be spending money at conservative, Christian-owned companies. But even if you bought a refrigerator there and everyone else on FR did too, and we went back and bought another refrigerator every day, that would not keep Hobby Lobby in business. There’s no way they’d have enough extra money to keep paying $1.3M a day in fines.
As far as I can see, they have a few alternatives:
1. They can cut all their employees back to 29.9 hours per week so they’re excluded from the need to pay for health insurance that meets the standards of the mandate. They would have to hire a lot of additional people to take up the slack, and would be harming many of their full-time employees.
2. They could make all their employees contractors, for whom they have no responsibility to provide health insurance. I’m told this is not legal in a retail environment.
3. They could try to comply by giving their employees vouchers to go out and get their own insurance.
4. They could ignore the fines and let the government sue them, which could take awhile.
5. They could declare bankruptcy and wait to be bought by some company that doesn’t have their moral values.
6. They could just close their doors and put 21000 employees and tens or hundreds of thousands of dependent suppliers out of work.
If there’s another way of avoiding this while remaining in business, I haven’t thought of it, but I’m sure the Green family would be open to suggestions.
All true points - but - one of the reason zero and his merry fools get away with this is because there is NOT a huge backlash from business.
While it is important to patronize stores that are “conservative, Christian-owned” it is equally important to NOT patronize those stores that won’t speak up. Nothing talks as loud as money (or the lack thereof). If 60% of the retail stores in this country were up in arms, change would happen. One little ole chain can’t win the battle by themselves.
The worst part is - I feel fairly certain that 60% of the store owners in this country DON’T agree with this crap. They just feel like, “well, why should I speak up, it will just bring a bunch of weirdos and perverts to protest outside my stores.” If we could give them a choice between lack of sales and weirdos, MONEY WOULD TALK THE LOUDEST.
The problem for us, especially with big ticket items, there’s not much to chose from. In 2010 I bought a Ford because they didn’t take money from the government. Barely a few months later they were announcing plans for “domestic partner coverage” in their insurance. Later this summer we are going to trade in another of our cars, and I can’t find a make that at some point hasn’t pandered to perverts.
In so many cases, our only choices are only the lessor of many evils.
Incorporate two companies. 1 is the Hobby company. 1 is the Lobby company. They share the same facility wherever they operate and the same employees. But the Hobby company only employees part timers for 29.9 hours a week and the Lobby company only employees part timers for 11.1 hours a week. Give all the employees a raise for having to deal with 2 W2s. Close the Hobby Lobby company until we get a new administation.