There's never a bad time to make a bad political statement. This one made me giggle a little bit, because it proves beyond all measure that the cost to cover employees is minimal. Would you mind paying 33 cents on your bar tab to make sure that employee serving you was healthy? I wouldn't.
Gator's Dockside has around 500 employees with locations in Central Florida and in the Jacksonville area. The chain began rolling out the extra charge earlier this month and has posted signs warning customers about the change.
Managers say the surcharge won't cover the entire cost of the health care increase, but the mandate has forced restaurants to hire human resources representatives and an outside compliance firm to handle extra paperwork.
"Instead of increasing menu prices 5, 10, 20 percent or whatever we need to do, if we did a one time untaxed surcharge it would be cheaper in the long run," Neal said.
Neal said the added fee is not any sort of political statement of publicity stunt.
Yeah, sure it's not, but I'm not sure it's making the statement they want it to make either. After all, 1 percent of the tab is a very small price for anyone to pay so that server, bartender, or busboy has access to health insurance, right?
