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Heartache: Worker Managed Restaurant Unexpectedly Fails

 
 
 
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Trausti

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Capitalism is terrible, because the workers are robbed of their production. It is absolutely wrong to put profit before people. If only the workers wrestled control away from the capitalist, everything will work out to theory.

A “Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, closed its doors this week after customers complained that they could no longer tolerate the bizarre hours, high prices and long lines.
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Damn. Why didn't this work out?
 
Trausti said:
Capitalism is terrible, because the workers are robbed of their production. It is absolutely wrong to put profit before people. If only the workers wrestled control away from the capitalist, everything will work out to theory.

A “Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, closed its doors this week after customers complained that they could no longer tolerate the bizarre hours, high prices and long lines.
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Damn. Why didn't this work out?
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Didn't work because it didn't have the support of a Marxist gubmint behind it. Would have thrived, had it received adequate subsidies.
Alternately, it failed because the owner/operators had their collective head up their ass.
 
That is an absolute indictment of the failures of the communist ideology.

The 60% of regularly run restaurants which fail in the first few years are in no way any kind of failure of capitalist ideology, though. The people running those restaurants weren't real capitalists.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
That is an absolute indictment of the failures of the communist ideology.

The 60% of regularly run restaurants which fail in the first few years are in no way any kind of failure of capitalist ideology, though. The people running those restaurants weren't real capitalists.
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Shhhhh, don't. Let Trausti feed his Cognitive bias in peace.
 
60% failure rate seems less than 100% failure rate of anything Marxist ever.

At least this restaurant failed without mass starvation or death camps,
 
So, a shitty hipster vegan-cult restaurant with "bizarre" hours and really expensive food closed. Imagine that, 20-somethings, probably college students or hippy-minded people didn't have the money to eat there. Or maybe there just weren't enough in the neighborhood.

The fact of the matter is, they didn't fail in their financial model, they failed to open a restaurant that served a diverse enough client base to thrive at all in the neighborhood. The only place I have ever seen such a restaurant like that succeed is buried neck deep in a college neighborhood. In other news, they seem to be doing just fine as a vegetarian worker-owned free trade hipster nest, namely The Hardtimes Cafe in Minneapolis. You can look them up.

I think it is unethical to say the least to point to their ownership model and say THAT was the thing that sunk them rather than the plethora of other bad decisions they made.
 
If your claim ends with "Restaurant Unexpectedly Fails", there's something wrong with your claim. It really doesn't matter much what your claim begins with.
 
Trausti said:
Capitalism is terrible, because the workers are robbed of their production. It is absolutely wrong to put profit before people. If only the workers wrestled control away from the capitalist, everything will work out to theory.

A “Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, closed its doors this week after customers complained that they could no longer tolerate the bizarre hours, high prices and long lines.
Click to expand...

Damn. Why didn't this work out?
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A business or organisation needs leadership and proper allocations of responsibilities. Workers could possibly run a successful business if they ran it as a normal business but had a profit share system which also allocates reserve funds. Such concepts would be Worker's Cooperatives.

Communist countries have management structures to ensure leadership and proper prioritizing responsibilities and objectives
 
whichphilosophy said:
A business or organisation needs leadership and proper allocations of responsibilities. Workers could possibly run a successful business if they ran it as a normal business but had a profit share system which also allocates reserve funds. Such concepts would be Worker's Cooperatives.

Communist countries have management structures to ensure leadership and proper prioritizing responsibilities and objectives
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And why do you think they do it properly??
 
Look, just because no communist country has ever done it successfully in history doesn't mean that it wouldn't work if somebody finally did it properly. Since the theory is flawless, all they need to go is not fuck up the implementation like everyone else who's tried to implement it has.
 
You must realize the difference between the concepts of "division of responsibility" and "common ownership".
That everybody owns the producibc means does not mean that everybody should have a saying in every question. A boss is not more valued, he just has another job, being a coordinator. In fact, most bosses are really helpers: helping the workers (that produce the actual value) to do their work.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
whichphilosophy said:
A business or organisation needs leadership and proper allocations of responsibilities. Workers could possibly run a successful business if they ran it as a normal business but had a profit share system which also allocates reserve funds. Such concepts would be Worker's Cooperatives.

Communist countries have management structures to ensure leadership and proper prioritizing responsibilities and objectives
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And why do you think they do it properly??
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Personally I've worked with good and lousy management in China and the Middle East and good and lousy ones in the UK.

I'm back in London and parts are like a ghost town where numerous restaurants and businesses have gone out of business. Restaurants do have a high failure rate where there is a lot of competition which is increasingly over pricing as EU customers have shrinking budgets for eating out.
 
This company that failed was 100% capitalist. To be anything else, it would have to be owned and run by the government. It was not. It was owned and controlled by private parties, which is the definition of Capitalism.

Worker-owned is just a profit-sharing structure within the broader umbrella of "capitalism". It is no more communist than the stock-market where ownership is spread across a collection of individuals.

Further, the idea that worker-owned companies are extreme failures is completely false. Here is a link to the 100 largest employee-owned companies in the US. To qualify, they must be more than 50% owned by employees and more than 50% of employees must be eligible to be owners. All of these 100 companies have more than 1000 employees and more than half of them are 100% employee-owned. Many have been in bussiness for more than 40 years with the average being around 25 years old.

The fact that communist states have been failures is largely irrelevant because virtually all such states have been non-democratic dictatorships, where an all powerful dictator owns and controls all companies. IF the government is not democratic, then government ownership is no sense "public" owned but rather privately owned by a single person who also controls the state.
 
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Here is the problem. The first is the definition of "works". What do we mean to say when we ask if something works?

The slave economy was our main economic system for thousands of years and still exists underground in some places of the world. It must have "worked" all of that time or else no one would have used it. Then we had feaudalism for several hundred years. It must have worked, at least for a while too. Now we have capitalism with a recent attempt of many countries to develop a Marxian economic system. Capitalism must "work" or it wouldn't have been used. The old command economies must have "worked" or everyone would have died or run around naked. The USSR was around 70 years, not just a couple. So something about it must have "worked" despite all the criticisms it gets.

Is it really a question that these systems do or do not work, or is it really a matter for whom they work for the best?


What would the Eastern Bloc command economies have to deliver economically speaking for them to have been considered as "working" to those here who oppose such systems?
 
A higher quality of living for its people than competing economies. If an economic system can't deliver that, it's a failure compared to the alternatives.
 
Then they arguably did work. The alternative for most wasn't western/first world status but pre-industrial feudal poverty (and probably slave status under Nazi occupation by the 1950s). They lifted millions of dispossessed peasants out of abject poverty and educated them. Even when the Soviet Union fell apart, attempts to go capitalist begat gangster cronyism in which the average Russian was no better off or even worse off.
 
Canard DuJour said:
Then they arguably did work. The alternative for most wasn't western/first world status but pre-industrial feudal poverty (and probably slave status under Nazi occupation by the 1950s). They lifted millions of dispossessed peasants out of abject poverty and educated them. Even when the Soviet Union fell apart, attempts to go capitalist begat gangster cronyism in which the average Russian was no better off or even worse off.
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Explains why the West Germans built that bug wall to stop all of their citizens from defecting to the East.
 
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