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Wednesday, December 09, 2020

NYT gloats about demise of city's restaurants

Greg Bensinger, a token white boy on the editorial board of the New York Times, wrote with crocodile tears today about the demise of the restaurant industry, which Democrat and RINO governors from coast-to-coast have shuttered. One in six restaurants nationwide no longer exists.

The ones that do must pay highwaymen using apps such as DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub to deliver their food and drinks.

Bensinger reported, "These restaurants have quickly found that the apps, with their high fees and strong-arm tactics, may be a temporary lifeline, but not a savior. Fees of 30% or higher per order cut eateries’ razor-thin margins to the bone. And a stimulus package that would bolster the industry has stalled in Congress, even as states and municipalities enact  new limits on both indoor and outdoor dining."

This really is highway robbery.

And it makes me wonder if dictators like Cuomo, DiBlasio, and Whitmer don't own stick in these companies because turning a two-week lockdown into a permanent rewrite of human interaction has sent these stocks soaring.

When they shut down the restaurants in New York City, I knew Manhattan was doomed.

The reader who tipped me to the Times story wrote, "The restaurant industry has long been a staple to NYC. People only feel really safe indoors. Also cooking food in small poorly ventilated apartments has never been popular. The average output for  individual dining in the upper east side was $35,000 per year in 1997."

Do you really think John Podhoretz and the rest of the swells will stay home and cook? They may hire a chef (and I pity the fool who works for Podhoretz) but that will get stale. Newsom in California and other fat-cat politicians have ignored their own rules to dine in 3-star restaurants.

While their constituents suffer cabin fever, the elitists suffer mansion fever.

My reader continued, "Bensinger has pizza like food delivered by some illegal slave on a bike so he has no sympathy for the thousands of people who worked in that industry."

Of course, the restaurant industry survives on illegal labor. Why do you think all those chefs called Donald John Trump racist when he called to build the long-promised wall in 2015?

Illegal aliens make possible the places where Podhoretz dines. If they paid minimum wage and obeyed state employment rules, these joints would suffer.

Even with the high fees, the companies lose money.


The money comes in but no one makes any money. This does not pass my smell test. If they do not make money when they have a chokehold on the restaurants, what happens when there are no restaurants to dash the doors or hub the grub?

(My wife uses HubGrub -- sending me out to get the occasional Mary B from Tudor's House of Biscuits.)

Bensinger ended his column, "Consumers can help by ordering directly from restaurants for pickup and by using the apps sparingly. And lawmakers too should wait no longer to extend workers a new stimulus package and help to limit the prohibitive fees the apps charge small businesses.

"DoorDash’s I.P.O. will mint countless new millionaires. But is an industry designed to enrich the elite and built atop a growing heap of struggling restaurants truly worth celebrating?"

We all know what would really help: Ending the unconstitutional and ineffective lockdowns. Any idiot can see that and surely the idiots at the Times do.

But the lockdown is destroying a huge swath of the middle class, and the middle class are the enemy of communists. And so the New York Times gloats.