No surprise that Seattle restaurants can’t afford to stay open

Taken from Monday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

Seattle restaurants are closing because of the coming of $15 an hour.

I’m not just talking about the fast food joints, which, by the way, do I feel for those guys. Those franchise owners are not rich people. If you have 20 or 30 stores, you can make a lot of money. If you have one or two or three outlets, you’re just a small business, just like any other small business. But they’re telling them, ‘Oh, no, because you’re part of a big, evil corporation you’re going to have to ramp up to $15 an hour even quicker.’

Related: Boze asks why not immediately adopt $16 minimum wage?

Then you have the number of restaurants that are closing down because of $15 an hour. Seattle Magazine had a story about this. Queen Anne’s Grub restaurant closed Feb. 14. Pioneer Square’s Little Uncle shut down Feb. 25.

The restaurant owners said certainly there are a lot of reasons, but they said that $15 an hour is a major factor in all of this.

Since the legislation was announced last summer, The Seattle Times and Eater have reported on restaurant owners’ concerns about how they’re already operating on a thin margin. Now you have a bunch of restaurants that are closing with the advent of $15 an hour. It’s starting to get a lot of national attention.

I know this is hard to imagine, but there are real world consequences. For everybody who gets a little bump up in salary, there are jobs lost when businesses can’t operate.

But because we have a bunch of people in politics around here who have no idea what the real world is like, who have made their entire life in this insulated bubble of politics, they have no clue about what these guys are going through.

Taken from Monday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

SK