A fully informed coffee purchase

On the 1st of September last year, the city of Seattle mandated that all businesses with five or more employees, full or part-time, within the city limits had to give their employees at least five days of sick-leave. They also put a stop to the “use-it-or-lose-it” clause, wherein an employer had to let you roll your left-over sick-days from one year to the next.

One coffee shop owner in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood decided to inform his customers how much this was costing him, and in turn them by placing a 1.5% “sick-leave surcharge” on every purchase.

As you have probably guessed, this has caused a bit of a shit-storm amongst the hipsters that inhabit First Hill and its neighbor, the infamous Capital Hill.

Says Slog Tipper Whitney: “There were many ways (Cherry Street Coffee owner Ali Ghambari) could have dealt with this. He could have upped prices slightly to compensate, for example.” But instead, says Whitney, “he chose to call himself out as a royal dickhead for life, because now we all know he wasn’t paying for sick leave before forced to by law.”

I called Ghambari to see if he agreed with that assessment. Incidentally, he says on his website that “Cherry Street is all about building love and community.” Ghambari confirms that he’s the author of the signs, which went up at all the cash registers last week. “Obviously, this is something we never had in our budget,” he says. ” We never had sick leave before.” He says offering sick leave will cost him “$25,000 to $30,000 a year, easy,” for his 45-plus employees.

“My employees know, hey, you’re gonna get 40 hours time off for sick leave,” he says. “Even if you are not sick, you’ll get that paid to you anyway.” Under the new law, for a business his size, 40 hours of accrued sick time can be rolled over from one year to the next. “If one of my employees is not sick for the whole year,” he says, “all of a sudden next year, you’ve got 80 hours. I don’t want my employees calling in sick when they’re not sick to get a day off.” I asked him how the rollover of sick leave would cause his employees to be dishonest. He did not have an answer. “It’s not about dishonesty,” he says. “I’m not driving a Mercedes, I’m actively working my business. I feel pretty comfy with (this decision). If some people don’t feel good about it, bring it on, we’ll talk about it.” But so far, he says, “We haven’t gotten any comments about it.”

Once again, progressives show that they believe when someone gets a business license, they also receive a tree that grows money which the business owner can use to cover costs not paid for with revenue.

And when it is proven that business owners do not get such a tree, they would rather they just shut up and make the customer eat the higher costs without being honest with them as to why prices have gone up.

A proper “head in the sand” mentality.

And these folks believe that everyone should get 6 weeks of paid time off and an hourly wage of $20 or more.

Couldn’t these folks take just one fucking Econ course amidst their Art degrees and learn something about how the real world works and leave the rest of us who already know alone?