Seattle Restaurant Boom After $15 Minimum Wage Confounds RWNJs

I am starting to have myself a backlog of what I call blogging fodder which I don't get around to blogging, due to not feeling much like doing so, due to being in about week three of feeling miserable due to an allergic reaction to the air that I breathe which has been overstocked, of late, with too much pollen from weed, grass and trees.

Too much pollen which has been manifesting itself in a daily headache.

So, yesterday, or was it the day before, I saw that which you see here, on the front page of the Seattle Times online. I guess this falls into the category of things I see in west coast news sources, usually the Seattle Times, which I would never expect to see in the Fort Wort Star-Telegram, about something similar in Fort Worth.

But, that is not what amused me.

Way back a couple years ago when Seattle opted to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, RWNJs (Right Wing Nut Jobs) like college dropout, Rush Limbaugh, and his ignorant hate mongering ilk, spread propaganda lies about four Seattle restaurants being forced to close the very week this minimum wage increase was announced, but well before even the first stage became reality.

And now, a couple years later, with Seattle restaurants paying their help the $15 an hour minimum, even before the final mandated raise to that level, not only has this pay raise not resulted in an epidemic of restaurant closures, apparently the Seattle restaurant scene is booming.

Of course the RWNJs have all sorts of explanations, just like they always seem to do, for once again being wrong about something.

Last summer, August 14 to be precise, David, Theo and Ruby took me to downtown Seattle, to Dick's, where I got to eye witness experience the damage done to Seattle's restaurant businesses by the liberal socialist madness that raised the minimum wage.

Below is a photo I took whilst waiting in line at Dick's....

Dick's starts at $15 an hour, with $25,000 college scholarships, childcare assistance, free health insurance, paid community service, along with regular merit raises.

Now, Dick's has long been known for being a great fast food place to work, with a highly evolved, progressive social conscience.

Meanwhile, in a Texas town like Fort Worth, in what is known as a "right to work" state, which basically means such a state is a union busting state, I don't think there are any fast food places in existence of the Dick's sort.

Working in a right to work state, a restaurant worker in Fort Worth is not even paid the paltry Texas minimum wage of $7.25. If a Texas restaurant worker receives at least $30 a month in tips their employer can get away with paying a minimum wage of only $2.34 an hour. Supposedly the tips are supposed to amount to what results in a $7.25 minimum wage, allowing the employer to pay that paltry minimum. In Texas you can probably guess how well this is regulated and enforced.

So, a month or so ago someone, I think it was Elsie Hotpepper, verbalized about being surprised what a ghost town downtown Fort Worth was on a Saturday. And that the service her group received in one of downtown Fort Worth's few restaurants was atrocious.

Is it really that hard to see the link between how much one pays ones restaurant workers and how well that restaurant operates?

It is not just restaurants. When I am in Washington the quality level of just about everything, store wise, and other wise, is noticeably way more competent and better run than the craptacularness I experience in Texas. Just the difference between a Texas Walmart and the Walmart I went to in Tacoma was surprising. Or any other store, or restaurant.

And another thing. At Dick's I got a Dick's Deluxe, Cheeseburger, Fries and Strawberry Shake. The price of each was about what I remembered them being way back when I lived in Washington late in the previous century. If I remember right, on August 14 a Dick's Deluxe was $3.45. That seems close to what I remember such costing long ago. But, I have to admit, the Dick's Deluxe seemed smaller than I remembered it being.

But, that seems to be the case with just about every thing I remember....