After Min Wage Increase, This Fast Food Juggernaut Is Eliminating Positions Left And Right

The thing about minimum wage is that often times it is a tester for people, for businesses to see if someone is eventually worth the investment of paying them more than what they would otherwise get.

Minimum wage hikes are nothing but good news for the low-wage American worker, right? If Elizabeth Warren says it, it’s pretty much gospel — just like her Native American forbears in the Sac and Fib Nation that she used to talk about, who were obviously completely real.

Unfortunately, those dastardly capitalists who insist on oppressive things like “turning a profit,” “staying in business” and “acknowledging economic realities” continue to keep the proletariat from earning $15 an hour for their unskilled contributions to the labor pool.

The latest offender? The dirty pigs at Red Robin, who for whatever reason, don’t believe their job is to serve as a public utility that pays employees more than they’re worth for jobs that pretty much anyone could do.

According to the New York Post, the hamburger chain plans to eliminate busboys at its 570 locations to offset the hit to its bottom line created by the upsurge in the cost of minimum wage workers.

“We need to do that to address the labor increases we’ve seen,” Red Robin CFO Guy Constant told an audience at the ICR retail conference in Orlando, Florida, on Monday.

Red Robin, based in Colorado, has most of its restaurants in western states, where minimum wage hikes have been most pronounced.

The chain has already eliminated the so-called expediter position, which involves individuals who would plate food to get the dish out faster in order to sate the gaping maws of the filthy bourgeois who insist on decent service for their money.

Not only did Red Robin executives find that it apparently didn’t make enough of a difference to drive the inegalitarian commoners away from their delicious, plutocrat-fabricated bread-and-meat concoction, they also saved $10 million in the deal. The company similarly expects to save $8 million by eliminating the busboy position.

Needless to say, the monocle-wearers at Red Robin had plenty of running dogs willing to provide a dose of reality economics to the media, like 1851Franchise.com editor-in-chief Nick Powills.

“From a business standpoint, (Red Robin made a) very smart move. From an employee standpoint, you just cut out $8 million worth of labor,” Powills told Fox Business.

“The interesting thing about the minimum wage hike is that those that made the decisions to do it, did it on behalf of the employee … when intentions are good, and you can’t appease everybody, someone is going to eventually be on the short (end of the) stick.”

Meanwhile, the president and chief operating officer of restaurant franchise MOOYAH Burgers, Fries & Shakes, Michael Mabry, saidminimum wage hikes were making it difficult for him to run a viable business, noting that he was “greatly affected by … rising costs.”

“What we are looking at, of course, is how do we build efficiencies within the restaurant to keep the same guest service … with the same people, but still allow franchisees to make money? Some of that comes through renegotiation of leases (and contracts) … unfortunately some of it comes through (increasing) menu prices,” Mabry said.

Oh, boo hoo, Mr. Mabry. Just keep on providing those $15 entry-level jobs to my fellow peace studies majors until the revolution comes and we can rightly take our positions in Comrade Sanders’ newly formed Ministry of Gender Pronoun Enforcement. Maybe then you won’t be first against the wall.

Sadly, the tyranny of concrete facts continues to oppress the working class. Why, back in 2016, a University of Washington-led study threw a counterrevolutionary wrench in the People’s Republic of Seattle’s bold move to defy the multifarious chains of economic reality by mandating pay of $15 an hour for fast food sinecures. That piece of right-wing piffle from the fascists (in, uh, state-run academia) pointed out that the measure reduced hours and jobs while doing nothing to raise the take-home pay of individuals in said jobs.

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