Skinny Pancake owner Benjamin Adler says that if he paid a “livable wage” to employees working at his airport restaurants, he’d have to charge $20 for a sandwich. “No restaurant pays their dishwasher $17.71 an hour,” he tells Seven Days. “It’s not sustainable.”
Adler was reacting Tuesday to an avalanche of outrage prompted by a Burlington Free Press article, which reported that Burlington’s mayor and board of finance had approved the Skinny Pancake’s request for an unusual exemption from the city’s livable wage ordinance. Burlington’s ordinance requires that city employees and contractors receiving taxpayer funds pay workers a “livable” wage — presently $13.94 an hour, or $17.71 an hour if health insurance is not provided — unless they received a hardship exemption.
Adler lobbied for a hardship exemption and city officials approved one because Skinny Pancake says it would lose money on the airport venture otherwise. One reason for the special treatment: The Skinny Pancake and its sister restaurant, the Chubby Muffin, source almost all of their meat, cheese and vegetables from Vermont farmers and food producers. Adler estimates his restaurants spend $400,000 a year purchasing Vermont-grown foods — and will spend an additional $250,000 buying local food for the airport cafes.
The Free Press article also suggested — without saying explicitly — that Mayor Miro Weinberger’s personal relationship with Adler and his brother, Ted, both of whom supported the mayor’s campaign last spring, could have influenced the outcome.
Adler vigorously defended the exemption even as people who helped pass the livable wage ordinance back in 2001 warned that the move set a troubling precedent. Adler argues that the livable wage ordinance itself might need review. In spirit, he says he’s “all for” guaranteeing a livable wage to people working on the taxpayer’s dime. “But in practice, it’s setting the bar so high that even a company like mine can’t get near it. Is that the right bar to have set?” asks Adler, who pays himself “barely more” than livable wage standards. “Or is it too much money?”
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Again, if you would like to look at the numbers with me, we are 100% open book. The reality is that this is NOT a ‘cushy’ contract…it is actually a big risk…bigger than many other places we could try to open because of the cost of renovating behind TSA lines and the cost of the lease (10% of sales with a guarantee at ~$150k+/yr). The risk is real. Not all shops at airports make $ hand over fist and the reason they charge som much is because industry standard is 10% of sales for rent…ALOT MORE than elsewhere.
Unless you’re willing to look at the actual numbers–all available publicly–I can’t find, and don’t know how others could, validity in your argument…and am done trying. You are welcome to have the last word as I will not be responding to you here.
Don’t tout free market bullshit when the topic of the debate is a government granted monopoly contract awarded to the business whose owner’s brother just happened to be friends with the mayor partially responsible for choosing who got the gig. I mean, really dude! You give libertarians a bad name which you pull this kind of bullshit.
Acquaintances? Do acquaintances provide such ringing endorsements?
http://threadvt.com/?p=1173
After SP was awarded the contract, there was no way for the other groups to request an exemption because YOU ALREADY HAD THE CONTRACT. The only way that could have happened is if bids were re-opened in September, and the city was not going to violate a contract that had already been awarded.
“No matter how many times you say “only an idiot””
I only said it once. Claiming he has “the numbers” to support his claim that he isn’t going to be making any money from this gig is just absurd. Claiming he’s doing it to promote his business’ “mission”, whatever that is, is equally absurd. He hasn’t stayed in business for 15 years by making poor business decision simply because he believes in his business practices.
Ultimately this is a chance to get in on “free money” from “trapped travelers” at the airport. Anyone with an ounce of integrity wouldn’t get involved in such an enterprise, especially if were able to happen due to special circumstances (i.e. my brother is friends with the mayor).
The city shouldn’t be opening shops in an airport in the first place. Instead of wasting taxpayer money on building infrastructure to support private businesses, travelers can easily go out to eat prior to arriving at the airport. The only reason to build such infrastructure at the airport is so that government officials can provide their business buddies with opportunities to over charge the public on goods they could easily obtain prior to arriving at the airport.
I don’t need to look good, I’m not the one taking cushy government contracts. What I need to do is attract attention to a situation that, in my opinion, is bad mojo for the public good. If hyperbole and cussing get people talking, it’s done it’s job.
What mission? What exactly are you hoping to achieve by getting this gig at the airport? Charging people out the wazoo for something they could get cheaper at your restaurant outside the airport? Please don’t try to convince me with the “local suppliers” nonsense. You could just as easily provide folks leaving Burlington via air travel with a discount on their way out of the city if you wanted to “promote” your business practices. Your location is within easy walking distance of two major hotel chains and at the heart of the tourist area. There’s no reason why you would need to take a gig that had the potential to loose money just so you could promote “local suppliers”.
To highlight ridiculousness of this all I’m going to repeat something I said elsewhere in this forum… Why does the airport need a Skinny Pancake, which will charge you out the nose for a crepe? Can people not eat breakfast at the restaurant BEFORE they go to the airport? I don’t really see what the “public good” of this entire scenario is about. Airports are for people to board airplanes, not shop at the mall and dine out.
Airport shops make their money by over charging for their goods. They make money, hand over fist, because of the artificial monopoly granted by the government on such sites. Gigs such as these are fought over with much gusto just for this reason. It is also why they are often awarded to businesses who have the right connections to the government officials responsible for choosing who gets the contracts.
If you are an honest businessman, you wouldn’t want anything to do with such a dirty arrangement.
Working in a restaurant is typically low skill labor; no surprise it doesn’t pay Wall Street wages. If you have the skills or education to make more money, good for you and go for it. For people who don’t the $13 and change average wage for a Skinny Pancake employee isn’t all that bad, especially around here.
No matter how many times you say “only an idiot”, the fact remains that you are misunderstanding what happened and ignoring most of the actual, pertinent facts. Being rude doesn’t make you right, although as we all know it’s easy to be a jackass on the Internet when you don’t go by your real name.
That’s the beauty of a generally free market; business charge customers what customers are willing to pay, pay their employees what they can afford to pay them, and employees can either accept that compensation or work somewhere else. No one is being forced into business with any other party.
Plenty of businesses take in a lot of gross revenue with razor thin margins; for businesses like those, including many restaurants, a thirty or forty percent increase in wage costs would easily and instantly make them non-viable. It’s not clear to me how any business person could fail to understand that, but it’s easy to model – if you are an employer, take your total payroll and multiply it by 1.4. Take the difference between that and your current payroll and subtract that from your total profit, and see if you end up with a positive number. If you are Bill Gates or Tim Cook, you will. Otherwise, its doubtful.
Because if he doesn’t have to pay the LWO, the airport operations add revenue and profit to his business? As he suggested, without the LWO exemption he wouldn’t open a money-losing site (nor would any bank or lending institution provide him the capital to do so).