The new year brought sad new for former President Bill Clinton: Filomena Ristorante — one his favorite Washington D.C. restaurants — cut its hours of operation due to Obamacare.
As of January, 1, 2014, Filomena has discontinued its Friday Lunch Buffet. We regret we had to make this decision but unfortunately we face new expenses as a result of the Healthcare reform and the Friday Buffet, though wonderful, was not profitable and required extra staff which we can no longer sustain. We regret any inconvenience and on a good note, we will continue our Saturday Buffet and invite you to try our much improved Sunday Brunch Buffet!
“Large employers” (those with more than 50 full-time workers) are required to provide health care coverage under Obamacare. Ignoring the mandate results in a penalty of $2,000 for each uninsured employee.
Obamacare also cut the number of hours an individual can work as a part-time employee. Prior to the legislation, up to 34 hours a week was considered part-time. Now, anyone with at least 30 hours will be considered a full-time employee.
Filomena further explained the decision:
Because of the potentially large new expense of offering healthcare coverage to 90 employees, we had to look for areas of operations that were either marginal or losing money to trim expenses or losses and find new areas to increase business so that we could keep all our employees and continue to grow our business.
Because restaurants such as ours, 86 employees, are so labor intense the potential expense of offering coverage to so many could threaten independently owned restaurants like ours. Our goal is to tackle the problem head on and find ways to pay for it without losing our employees. We have in fact done this by only offering a la carte lunch on Fridays, continue to offer the Saturday lunch Buffet and develop a new Spectacular new Sunday Brunch Buffet that has been a big success since its launch thus.
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Did you catch that? "The expense of offering coverage to so many could threaten independently owned restaurants like ours." Well Obama... so much for boosting the economy.
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