But they are. Look, in the days of half-hour lunches, you just can not get out, get over, get in line, get served , eat and get back in 30 minutes. Not even a hour in most case. Look, I worked in SF, at Schwab. I was Salaried, of course, but I noticed to get out to a sit down restaurant and back took over a hour & a half, and cost $25. Lines were very long, with heavy crowds.
If I wanted to get back in under a hour I had my choice of :one salad place, a burger joint, a crappy Mexican food truck or a place that sold grilled cheese sandwichs for $10 bucks.
Eating at the gourmet cafe inside, I could take my time and still be back in 30 minutes and have a lovely lunch for $10 or less.
Okay then. Most tech workers pay for lunches, and as I and others have said that even those of us who do or did stayed on campus, for convenience. Banning free lunches, even if it were possible, wouldn’t help the complaining restaurants at all.
This isn’t about tech workers or free lunches. The law bans all new cafeterias for all workers in all office buildings. This law is about protecting people who made bad business decisions.
Seems to me we should judge public policy as to whether it is good, and not at whom we think the policy is directed.
I am a flaming bleeding-heart liberal, and I think this proposed ordinance is ridiculous. The only businesses that are suffering because of employee cafeterias are the lunchtime-only places, many of whom appear to have not done due diligence when opening their restaurants.
Opposing worker benefits, and attempting to legally outlaw them, is actually a very Republican thing to do.
I would further venture to say that many of these complaining business owners are the very same people who will tell a poor person “no one owes you a living!”
oh ok, you are just allowed to leave a car running in the street and get out to buy your lunch? Just about everywhere else in the world would require you to park the car somewhere first. :rolleyes:
Yeah, I don’t get that either. Why *wouldn’t *they have a right to have a cafeteria, and offer their employees the ability to eat lunch on site? They’re still employing people to cook, to clean up, to run it…why is there some inherent right for the local businesses to expect everyone who works in the area to patronize their businesses? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t know what brujaja means by “an inherent right”, but there is no right recognized by US or CA state law for employers to operate a cafeteria. Again, it can be a simple matter of zoning laws. Not good law, IMO, but nothing unconstitutional.
Where do you guys think the source of this right comes from?
Not that I’ve ever been to San Francisco, but if the word “downtown” is involved isn’t this a clue that you’d be walking down the street? Where does this “car” assumption come from?
I don’t know Ravenman’s point but cities have long been allowed to craft neighborhoods. If a city decides that cafeterias are acting like restaurants when they only intended a tech business to set up shop in that location, it’s not ridiculous if they take steps to change that “loophole”. Local governments give all sorts of benefits to drag employers to their location. It’s not exactly communism to also have restrictions.
I don’t think it’s either/or in the city. In the 'burbs, it’s unlikely you will be able to walk from your office to a restaurant. In the city, maybe you can and maybe you can’t. Also, SF is notoriously hilly, which makes walking more difficult for some people.
Perhaps you would take a cable car, with a Rice-A-Roni sign on the back. It’s the San Francisco Treat!
Reasonable point. You realize my comments have been primarily aimed at the debate as set up by the subject line of the thread, right?
I don’t really think they do. For example, let’s say this country gets its shit together and provides universal health insurance, there’s some flavors of those policies that may not allow private insurance. If such a law were enacted, I don’t see what law would protect employers who wanted to offer such insurance … so I’m inclined to say that a business’s ability to offer food, insurance, retirement benefits, etc is a matter of law, not of rights.
Do you live in a dense city? People who drive cars to work often park their car in the morning, and return to it in the evening; not go get it during the day. That would be especially true of downtown SF, where driving a mile can sometimes take 40 minutes.
Again, I’m not endorsing this policy in and of itself, but exactly yes. Businesses are generally under other zoning restrictions: in many areas, you can’t have people reside in commercial office buildings. (Of course, there are plenty of places where such zoning is allowed or encouraged.) The general principle of cities establishing zoning to prohibit certain activity is uncontroversial. The question of whether such a zoning law for SF would even be successful in what it’s proponents seek it to do… eh, I’m skeptical, but it would sure seem they have the power to make such policies.
Depending on where the business is, there might not be enough restaurants nearby to handle the new traffic. With the real estate market these days it is not likely any existing restaurant will be able to expand.
Company cafeterias exist to serve a lot of people really quickly, and still be economically feasible for a lunch only crowd. Even if a restaurant did expand for the lunch crowd, it would be empty for dinner (relatively so) and go bust. And lunch, remember, is cheaper.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking around San Francisco lately, and I try to eat lunch after 1 pm to miss the crowds that already exist from businesses which don’t have cafeterias.
Nobody drives their private car to lunch in downtown SF. Even if you needed to get some place that is accessible by private vehicle only, it would be both cheaper and more convenient to Uber/Lyft there than to take your private vehicle.
I don’t care that the politicians are Democratic. Any legislation looking to boost business directly by removing choice smells of a Stupid Republican Idea of the Day.
This view is echoed by books like Chaos Monkey and Live, Work, Work, Work, Die. Having recently lost a friend of mine at 47, who spent most of his life in Silicon Valley working 80+ hour weeks chasing the dollars, it seems the tech companies can be as ruthless as their predecessors in many other industries. RIP Mike, you deserved better.
This is the larger problem. I think it’s happening all over the country as the income gap widens. It’s happening in my community as a series of toll roads which run along the same routes as the main freeways and essentially provide a different experience for the haves than the have-nots. It’s happening around the globe as well. The Big Sort has a lot of good data and examines this trend, which is ultimately just an outgrowth of the human preference for cognitive ease. There’s not a lot of hope on the horizon I’m afraid.
What is “the city”? Just taking Google as one example of the commercial entities of the city–Google is larger than the city. It’s larger than many states and countries. Google is part of the the city. It’s one of the most important components of the city, with the ability to make massive changes in the environment, economy, infrastructure, culture, etc., with each intentional or unintentional decision.
Every commercial entity is a component of “the city” and is responsible for the effect of its actions on “the city” and is responsible for making decisions that affect “the city” and its residents.
The idea that a commercial entity has absolutely no moral or ethical responsibility for the impact of its decisions is ridiculous. Google is changing the city by its very existence. Every decision it makes should be filtered through that reality.
Google shouldn’t make even one policy decision without considering the impact on the communities its decisions affect.
And because of that impact, everyone in the community should have a say in Google’s decision-making, especially when it might be setting a standard for work hours and other lifestyle matters.
And you know what? In order to Google to locate it’s campus there, they had to go thru a full Environmental Impact report, as well as get buy in from the City. (actually, Google just eases it’s main campus, that campus in mtn View was:
*SGI Campus
The site was previously occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). The office space and corporate campus is located within a larger 26-acre (110,000 m2) site that contains Charleston Park, a 5-acre (20,000 m2) public park; improved access to Permanente Creek; and public roads that connect the corporate site to Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail. The project, launched in 1994 was built on the site of one of the few working farms in the area and was city owned at the time (identified as “Farmer’s Field” in the planning documents).[2][3] It was a creative collaboration between SGI, STUDIOS Architecture, SWA Group, and the Planning and Community Development Agency of the City of Mountain View.[citation needed] The objective was to develop in complementary fashion the privately owned corporate headquarters and adjoining public greenspace. Key design decisions placed parking for nearly 2000 cars underground, enabling SWA to integrate the two open spaces with water features, shallow pools, fountains, pathways, and plazas. The project was completed in 1997. The ASLA noted that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space and awarded the project the ASLA Centennial Medallion in 1999.[4]
*
The City of Mtn View begged Google to come there.
So, Mtn View decided it wanted Google there, with all that came with that.
But we are not talking about Google, we’re talking about San Francisco. Altho, Yes, Mtn View has a similar law, it doesnt apply to Google, only new buildings.
Did Google take over other buildings in that complex? Sun used to be there also. I never worked there, but I did visit. It’s not like Google ripped up pristine farmland for their campus.
Not to mention that if the Google people went out for lunch every day, traffic would be a nightmare (more than it is now.)
Some years back Cisco had an all hands at Shoreline, and didn’t bother to get buses for people. 237 was a worse parking lot than usual. It would be like that every day if people had to go for lunch.
