Jamie Richardson is worried that the opportunities that some White Castle workers had in the past will simply disappear with the new minimum wage laws.
“We’re disappointed. What this means for White Castle is we really have to evaluate how we manage our business,” Richardson tells me. “About 30 percent of every sales dollar covers the pay of our hourly workers, and that doesn’t include management.
“It’s our biggest investment, our biggest cost. And it’s one that if we see increase dramatically through fiat, and we don’t do anything — it’s unsustainable,” Richardson says. “We are in uncharted waters.”
“Is there any room to raise prices to cover costs?” Richardson muses. “We think we’d need to increase menu prices by something like 50 percent. It’s not something we’ve done before. It’d be catastrophic.”Richardson says — and common sense dictates — that if menu prices at fast-food chains shoot up by anywhere near 50 percent, many people will stop eating out as much, replacing trips to White Castle with trips to the grocery store. Customers can always vote with their feet and their dollars.
“Candidly, this could create a whole generation of kids who won’t get their first job,” Richardson laments. “We’re in tough neighborhoods — and White Castle hasn’t abandoned those neighborhoods. On the surface, higher pay seems noble, but it’s not — because it denies the reality of the free-enterprise framework that has allowed small businesses like ours to thrive.”
White Castle is very proud of providing what for many of its workers is the first rung on the ladder of employment. And it loves to promote from within. Richardson tells me that of White Castle’s 450 top employees in restaurant operations, “444 of them started out behind the counter in an hourly job.” Susan Milazzo, the regional director in charge of the 35 Castles in the greater New York City area, is a prime example of a worker who started out on the bottom rung and worked her way up.But some of White Castle’s successes are even more exceptional: Richardson tells me the story of Jahangir Kabir, a Bangladeshi immigrant who came to America without knowing a word of English. He got a job as a cook at a White Castle and learned the vernacular by interacting with customers. In four years, he was a general manager. On the way to being promoted to district supervisor in charge of eight Castles, Kabir went to school, earning an MBA from St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn in 2005. Recently he completed a Ph.D. in business administration — and it all started at White Castle, cooking fries.
In the hyper-competitive restaurant industry, margins are slim — Richardson says that, in a typical year, White Castle hopes to achieve a net profit of between 1 and 2 percent — and if labor costs go up, many restaurants will turn toward labor-cost-cutting automation or business models that don’t require many employees. That means a lot of kids won’t get that first job. After decades of baggage check-in kiosks at airports, ATMs, and self-check-out lines at the supermarket, is it really so hard to imagine automation replacing the kid behind the counter at burger joints?
Source: nationalreview.com
Don’t be surprised if someday the Liberals want to change the name from White Castle to Black Castle.
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