I absolutely love it when the Left ignores not only commonsense but history. Such as here, in (of course) 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.
There’s nothing “inadvertent” about this, because an Economics 101 student could have seen it coming.
In an industry which runs on 2.5% net margins and where savings of 0.15% on costs can end up with a promotion to VP, adding $4/hour to an already-high California $14 makes it inevitable that management would close two stores to keep that district’s aggregate costs down.
What’s even worse is that the city council’s actions were unnecessary. Just about everywhere, supermarket employees were raking it in during the various Chinkvirus lockdowns through overtime, as demand for product in many cases outstripped the stores’ ability to restock shelves, or else led to more frequent deliveries, which meant that shelf-packers needed to work longer hours to refill front-store real estate. This is not just anecdotal, but hard fact, and if the Long Beach city council had had an ounce of smarts, they would have known all about it. But no-o-o-o. They had to make a grand gesture to “reward” the “heroic” supermarket workers, and now about five hundred of said heroes will be out of a job. Some reward.
The common sense part is also lacking. As any fule kno, if you drive up overhead in a part of any business, that part will either be scaled back, replaced with a cheaper option or else eliminated altogether. It is common knowledge that in the face of “living wage” demands and impositions, the fast-food industry (which has higher margins than supermarkets) is working on replacing high-cost workers with robots. Supermarket work is more complicated than fast food work, so robotics could only go so far (and not very, in most cases) to reduce staff costs. Hence: store closings.
Of course, I said “as any fule kno”, but the Left and gummint [some overlap] are, as always, not going to let little things like commonsense and experience get in the way of Marxist principle or virtue-signaling.
The key here will be if they can repeal this stupid ordinance before Kroger closes the stores — assuming that they even want to do that and be shown up as the fucking morons they are.
Don’t hold your breath.