Strike once again in where else…California…
A new “Hero Pay” mandate in Long Beach, California has inadvertently cost some frontline grocery workers their jobs.
“Ralphs and Food 4 Less, both owned by the parent company Kroger, announced Monday that they will be closing 25% of their stores in Long Beach after the city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour,” local news outlet Fox 11 reports. Two stores in the area will be shut down.
A company spokesperson directly cited the city council’s ordinance mandating higher wages as the reason they are closing down.
“The irreparable harm that will come to employees and local citizens as a direct result of the City of Long Beach’s attempt to pick winners and losers, is deeply unfortunate,” the spokesperson said. “We are truly saddened that our associates and customers will ultimately be the real victims of the city council’s actions.”
Full article, HERE.
Grocery stores are NOT a huge profit center, making on the average less than 3% profit year to year. When you look at the average pay, a $4/hr raise is a huge impact and probably puts most of those stores in the red, especially in California with the cost of rent, power, etc. out there.
The ones that will suffer are the local employees, now out of work, and the local consumers that probably counted on those stores. Anybody remember the term food desert?
If you don’t here’s a quick reminder… A food desert is an urban or rural area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food.
In the urban world, it is considered to be 1 mile from a grocery store (assuming inability to drive to stores and/or limited public transportation).
In the rural world, it is considered to be 10 miles from a grocery store (assuming inability to drive to stores and no public transportation). Depending on which report you read, 20% or more of flyover country is considered a food desert, primarily due to the big box stores running all the small, locally owned and located stores out of business due to profit margin (or lack thereof).
What really hurts is when the big box store(s) close in a rural area, meaning people may have to drive up to 50 or more miles to find a grocery store.
All this does is build on existing health problems, with a lack of fresh vegetables and fruit. What IS available is mostly fast food, which we know isn’t all that good for us, even if we like it… sigh…
Sounds typical Cali-socist behaviour. P*ss poor planning.
Wow! I live in a food desert! I thought I lived in farming country.
We do, too, but from October until late Spring, there’s this thing called “winter”, which means so local fresh produce.
I’m seriously considering learning to how to can and/or preserve things this summer.
…city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour,”
The catch is the number of employees nationwide, meaning that small businesses owned by a single proprietor won’t be affected. Even so, this latest malfeasance will have an impact on all business, as the government demonstrates once again the unbelievable amounts of willful ignorance and blatant stupidity of the elected officials at the top of the heap, and at the same time flexes its bureaucratic biceps by passing and enforcing a harmful regulatory law.
If I were President of the Kroger company, I’d pull out of the area completely and without notice. I can just hear the whinging now… ‘You can’t do that! The people, the children… think of the children and the homeless! You heartless xenophobic misogynist! We’ll pass a law!!’
Go ahead and pass one. While you dither and blather into the nearest microphone, deliveries have stopped, stock has been liquidated, and the BLM folks have had a peaceful demonstration that somehow, someway, got out of hand and destroyed the buildings. Insurance won’t pay off.
Now what?
It is a Good Thing that you are Not Evil.
Mind, I do like the idea… Let them eat…er… er…
Kroger is not the bad guy in this. At the outbreak of the FEARdemic Kroger gave all their employees a $2.00 across the board special or hazard pay. This reportedly INCLUDED areas where there was already a $15 minimum wage so now they would be making $21 and hour. Not bad for someone that doesn’t know the difference in the veggies they are stocking or can;t make change without the computer telling them how to make it.
This once again proves the adage: The minimum wage always and everywhere is ZERO!
And note also that the Prog complaints about “food deserts” are only about cities.
Those rural peasants can just starve quietly. Except that we peasants continue to “fail to become extinct” as we sharpen the tines on our pitchforks. 🙂
John
To top it off, these are the same areas that are being most affected by the $950 max for ‘misdemeanor theft’ where individuals go pick up garbage bags from that aisle and go down and fill bags full of ‘free food’ to the tune of less than $950 a person per trip.
How is a business supposed to stay in business in this type of environment?
Hint. They’re not.
This is all about getting rid of evil capitalism and installing a national socialist/full blown communist system where the government has complete control of what you eat, drink, breathe, wash with, look at, where you live, what gulag you go to, etc.
I see Beans beat me to it.
There was a story about Walgreens shutting down pharmacies in the SF area because — surprise — theft was through the roof, thanks to the idiocy of the ‘misdemeanour theft’ rule.
I can only imagine how bad it’d be in a grocery store. You could collect a LOT of food with a $950 ceiling, even with inflation.
Deliberate malice.
They have mad schemes for ‘addressing food deserts’.
If people aren’t desperate enough to grant the power ‘needed’ to ‘address’ the problem, make the problem worse.
Yesterday’s ATH thread.
This isn’t a situation where the techniques to make a captor more likely to see you as human are relevant.
On the personal level, the right question is who you need to get distance from.
With the pols, they will never see you as human, some of them don’t see their own spouses and children as human. The distance you can manage to get from them, the amount of their power you can limit them to are not complete. If you don’t want to be destroyed as an unsatisfying toy, your option is killing them.
The main reason not to act immediately is that waiting still has a chance of reducing the cost of solving the problem.
Possibly this moral suasion stuff is worth it for the undecided, but I am a little lacking in patience right now.
I live 15 minutes from our small grocery store; 45 from the nearest town with 3 large groceries.
All- Thanks for the comments, good points all!
Commiefornia strikes again
When I lived in Oregon it was a half-hour drive to the food store for me. When they eventually opened up a Freddy’s in our town, then it was only 7 miles away and that was awesome.
I’m lucky to live in a small city with several grocery stores and a “natural food”store. There are two or three hardcore Latino stores I haven’t shopped – not the cuisine I favor. Competition is a wonderful thing, IMO.
The fact that those Latino stores have to have on site security personnel (San Fran Bay Area) is whats known as a “clue”.
Categories: stupid places, stupid people, doing stupid things, etc.
The stores they replaced didn’t need that.
All- Thanks and yes, flyover country IS a bit different…
Posted from my iPhone.
DANG!!!! I forgot to say that The STUPID is STRONG in Democrat-Land.