Just as a thought experiment let’s say Billy billionaire is bored and has a few spare million he wants to toss at a social experiment. He buys a bistro restaurant space in a very busy, economically vibrant downtown area to ensure he has a good mix of people from all walks of life travelling by.
The restaurant is set up as a private dining club and requires people who want to be members able to eat there to submit a brief resume. The restaurant is deliberately set up to serve amazing quality food at very reasonable prices. There will be no better food for the money to be had in the area. The deals will be too good to resist. Memberships costs nothing but applicants have to be approved. Membership can be withdrawn at a moments notice. You cannot take food out. All food has to be consumed on premises. Unlike most restaurant ventures he expects to lose money while in operation as his food is too good for the prices he is charging.
Billy has his restaurant managers deliberately screen out anyone above certain income level and he does background checks to ensure the applicants are not misrepresenting themselves. The only people that are allowed to eat there are people making middle class worker bee incomes and below. The only way you can get in the door is through having a club membership.
So now the swells are excluded from having breakfast. lunch and dinner at the best restaurant in the area, with the best food and the most reasonable prices. Their underlings can eat there, but they cannot, and their underlings cannot take food from the restaurant to bring to them.
What happens? Delicious smells every day coming from the restaurant a block from their office and the wealthy and successful are not allowed to go in. Do they care? Do they forbid their workers from going? Do the workers avoid it because they fear their bosses ire?
Assume this played out in the real world as a billionaires money losing lark. What would be the reaction?
There might be some clientele among strongly socially conscious people, the kind who can use the word “bourgeoisie” without having to look up the spelling.
Otherwise, I think success would depend on word-of-mouth, the restaurant’s location, and other uncontrolled factors which every restaurateur (another word I had to look up the spelling for) knows and dreads. It’s always a big spin of the random wheel.
I was thinking of a similar situation this morning staring at some Wellington Boots for sale. In Britain certain brands of such items, meant for farmers and stable people originally have a country set cachet that those who consider themselves gentry hog. I wondered how one could make an extremely desirable brand ( of anything ) and exclude the self-regarding snobs form purchase. Just to be mean to them.
Anyway, in the OP’s case, they would whine a lot in the national rags, denouncing you as an envious communist, and then destroy the enterprise. Which would be reborn in their image. The rich can’t stand any lack of respect for their numerous achievements in inheriting money.
Among the American high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals that I know, they aren’t so into food that this scenario would result in any pang of loss.
They are primarily busy people. They like convenience, and this value proposition (background checks for a meal) would strike them as very odd and a waste of their time anyway.
Often they eat with their families in the comfort of their homes or in exclusive places where they are completely insulated from the middle and lower classes (and even lower-upper class).
So my guess is that the average billionaire would give a micro-shrug of their shoulders and move on.
Consider: if every meal you eat is consistently the best food you’ve ever eaten, why would you care if you’re excluded from this single restaurant? On any given day, you can eat a meal anywhere in the world.
If you were to change the scenario to a restaurant that excluded, say, celebrities, would it change the thought experiment? I don’t think it would. Any privileged group that one wishes to exclude would probably not care.
On the other hand, let’s say that a single billionaire really, really cared about what he/she was missing. Then they would hire the chefs for themselves, if only for a private function.
The wealthy would start their own club and buy a better chef and charge half as much and welcome everybody until the other club is put out of business.
I’d argue that you can’t make “amazing quality food” and sell it for “very reasonable prices”. So what would happen is that Billy Billionaire would have to make it a non-profit restaurant, or watch it go out of business very quickly.
That said, I don’t think the rich would much care; there are too many restaurants of all service and quality levels around for one to make much difference.
While I agree with most people that the vast majority of wealthy people I know wouldn’t care, there are a definitely a few self important people I’ve run into who would get really wound up about it. Of course the other wealthy people think these guys are assholes. They’re the same guys you had to kick out of the country club because they were jerks to the wait staff.
There would be a campaign of pubic outrage about how rich people were being oppressed. It would be the same as men’s rights campaigns, “how come there’s no white history month?” campaigns, and Christian persecution campaigns. People who face the smallest amount of oppression make the loudest complaints.