Coyote Blog

In San Francisco, you have to pay your employees $14 an hour, you have to schedule their shifts at least 7 days in advance, you have to provide them with a meal break, but God forbid that you give them a free meal:

Two San Francisco supervisors want to do away with employer-provided free lunches, a perk enjoyed by thousands of people who work in the City. That’s because restaurant owners say they can’t compete.

It’s lunchtime at Perennial in SOMA but you wouldn’t know it. The seats are empty. Anthony Myint is the restaurant’s owner and says it’s extremely challenging owning a restaurant so close to big companies that have their own onsite free employee cafeterias.

“I think it’s never been harder to run a restaurant in the city then right now,” he said.

Other restaurant owners in the area agree.

“We see it in our business,” says Ryan Corridor, owner of Corridor. “We see thousands of employees in a block radius that don’t go out to lunch and don’t go out in support of restaurants every day — it’s because they don’t have to”

I really do not understand the business mindset that companies are somehow owed a minimum amount of revenue, but the same "logic" driving this law is also driving the Trump tariffs.  You asked for bipartisanship, and here it is -- Trump and San Francisco progressives are united in their belief that the job of government is to force consumers to shift their business, even at high personal cost**, to crony favored suppliers.

Thanks to several readers who sent me this story.

** Note that the cost is not just in dollars but also in extra time travelling from the office to an offsite restaurant.