Another Failed Socialist Experiment in Capitalism

I’m surprised a restaurant that overpaid employees, allowed employees to set their own hours, and didn’t allow tipping didn’t make it.

Remember the restaurant that allowed customers to set their own prices? No. And neither does anybody else, because it too closed.

MLive reported the closing of The Garden Diner and Cafe as follows:

The end has come for a popular Grand Rapids restaurant known as much for its creative vegan dishes as its progressive business model.

For much of its five-year existence, the eatery went by the moniker Bartertown Diner, until it was rebranded in September to The Garden Diner and Cafe.

The offbeat 30-seat eatery announced this month that its last day would be Wednesday, Nov. 30.

After a strong summer, the restaurant with about a dozen employees had struggled in recent months, said Thad Cummings. He took it over in March with Crystal Lecoy, who left two months later.

“I was an original investor in it,” Cummings said. “I wanted to push it to see if the model could be done.”

Sure, let’s see if socialism can work? Sure it will THIS TIME…NOT!

What were the issues that led to the close?

First, the restaurant was owned by Marxist.

Next, the restaurant was “worker run,” in that the employees actually set their own schedule. If you know anything about a business that requires some level of precision, allowing employees to work unsupervised can pose problems.

That’s was happened here.

At The Garden Diner and Cafe, customers complained…a lot. They soon tired of the bizarre hours the restaurant kept.

Then there was the high cost of food, since the restaurant paid $15 an hour to its workers. The good news is the restaurant had a “no tipping” policy. That had to make the overachievers feel well, had the restaurant actually had any.

Believe it or not, the next complaint was for long lines. The lines were long, not because the food was good, but because of the lazy, Leftist wait staff, who showed up whenever they wanted to.

The diner was described as follows on one site.

The Garden Diner and Cafe—previously known as the Bartertown Diner—featured a vegan, vegetarian and raw food menu that had met with significant national acclaim.

The article continued with the real problem.

But the restaurant’s business model, which did not allow for bosses or managers, promised a “living wage” to all employees and a strong union, did not allow the restaurant to make enough profit to stay in business.

Yet another example of Liberalism gone unchecked.

Remember the socialist who paid everybody $70,000?

The ploy was brilliant marketing. The company actually became the darling of the credit card processing business, as Liberals flocked to be overcharged by his company. As Today reported,

Instead, sales skyrocketed after the announcement, and Gravity Payments continues to take on new clients at a rate it never had before. It reports nearly doubling profits in a year, from $3.5 million in 2014 to $6.5 million in 2015. So Price is re-evaluating the metrics, and still trying to decide what his income should look like.

This is a nice way of saying, the experiment is over for the owner. He’s going back to the good life, when he paid himself $1,000,000 a year.