Minimum wage hikes in many states around the country and sky-high inflation are crushing independent restaurants that don’t want to raise prices on their customers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In January, 22 states raised their minimum wage for hourly workers, according to the WSJ. Around 59 percent of small business owners said that higher labor costs were the biggest source of inflation in January, requiring price hikes to maintain current revenue levels.
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An increasing number of restaurants and bars across the country are keeping a stock of Naloxone, an antidote to fentanyl and opioid overdoses, according to The New York Times.
Local officials and nonprofit organizations are ramping up efforts to more bars and restaurants as overdoses become all too common in public spaces, according to the NYT. Between February 2022 and February 2023, there were more than 105,000 reported drug overdoses in the U.S., according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, said on Fox News Tuesday that the expanded Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t just go after billionaires and large corporations.
“They are targeting people that they keep telling us they think are – restaurants and barber shops and so on,” Norquist told “America Reports” guest host Gillian Turner. “That’s their target, and we know this because every single Democrat in the Senate voted against, to defeat an amendment which said this law will not allow any increase in audits on people making less than $400,000 a year.”
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A new labor market survey found that a majority of employers, particularly restaurants, still cannot find enough workers.
The new report from Alignable said that 83% of restaurants can’t find enough workers. Overall, the report found that “63% of all small business employers can’t find the help they need, after a year of an ongoing labor shortage.”
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Americans are seeing the real costs of inflation in their daily lives as they pay record high gas prices, significantly increased grocery costs, and suffer sticker shock at restaurants, hair salons and other places.
Restaurants are charging more, with some posting notices on their doors. Increased prices, they say, are necessary to stay open simply to cover their increased costs for cooking oil and other goods. Some restaurants post signs accompanying empty containers to show that while they’re not increasing prices, their portion sizes are smaller.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues into its third year, William Paterson University is now laying off 100 full-time faculty over the next three years.
The university, located in Wayne, New Jersey, originally planned to let 150 professors go before union negotiations revised the number to 100, or 29% of the institution’s 340 faculty, reports Inside Higher Ed.
Thirteen tenured professors lost their job at the end of 2021, according to the outlet.
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Fast food chain McDonald’s is requiring all its staff and customers, vaccinated and unvaccinated, to resume wearing masks in its restaurants in areas deemed high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The company first announced its new rules in an internal memo to franchisees and workers, CNBC reported. The rules, which went into effect Monday, follow updated guidance last week from the CDC, which recommended fully-vaccinated Americans wear masks indoors to prevent the spread of the delta variant of coronavirus.
McDonald’s told the Daily Caller News Foundation the change in policy was due to the CDC’s updated guidance, and said the company was following the science in making its decision.
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A majority of Americans support requiring proof of vaccinations when traveling on planes and attending events with large crowds, a Gallup poll released Friday shows.
The survey found that 57% of Americans supported requiring proof of vaccination on airplanes and that 55% supported requiring proof for events like concerts, shows and live sports. Just 43% and 45% of Americans said they were opposed, respectively.
Majorities of Americans, however, rejected “vaccine passports” for dining at restaurants, going to work and staying in a hotel. Just 40%, 45% and 44% of Americans supported requiring proof of vaccination for each activity.
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Friendly’s Restaurants, the 85-year-old East Coast dining chain known for its Fribble milkshakes and ice cream sundaes, is filing for bankruptcy protection.
It joins a growing list of well-established restaurant chains that are failing due to an unchecked pandemic in the United States.
George Michel, CEO of FIC Restaurants Inc., Friendly’s parent company, said COVID-19 has had a “catastrophic impact” on operations. FIC will sell essentially all of its assets to the restaurant company Amici Partners Group.
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The Daily Caller reports, New York City could see up to half its restaurants and bars close permanently in the next six months because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new audit released Thursday from the New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
“New York City’s bars and restaurants are the lifeblood of our neighborhoods. The industry is challenging under the best of circumstances and many eateries operate on tight margins. Now they face an unprecedented upheaval that may cause many establishments to close forever,” DiNapoli said, according to an official statement.
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New York City plans to make its flourishing outdoor dining economy a permanent fixture of the city’s landscape going forward, municipal officials said in a press release on Friday.
The city’s “Open Restaurants” program, which has enrolled thousands of establishments since it debuted in June, “will be extended year-round and made permanent,” the city announced in the press release.
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When Nashville Mayor John Cooper announced at a July 2 press conference that he was shutting down all the city’s bars for 14 days, reducing restaurant capacity from 75 percent to 50 percent, and temporarily closing event venues and entertainment venues, all due to “record” cases of COVID-19 traceable to restaurants and bars, he apparently knew that his own Metro Health Department said less than two dozen cases of COVID-19 could be traced to those establishments. But he failed to disclose that the “record” of bar and restaurant traceable cases to which he referred to was about one tenth of one percent of Davidson County’s 20,000 cases of COVID-19.
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