If you thought there was any end to shitlib stupidity, that there simply had to be some point at which the perfidious chowderheads would smack their foreheads and mutter to themselves, “DAYUMM, this isn’t working! Could it be that we’re at fault here—that, instead of doubling down again and again on each successive failure, it might be time for us to rethink our basic premises?” PRO TIP: There isn’t, and they won’t.
San Francisco Bill Would Let People Sue Grocery Stores for Closing Too Quickly
A proposed ordinance would empower people to sue supermarkets that close without giving the city six months’ advance notice.The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.
Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months’ written notice to the city before closing down.
Supermarket operators would also have to make “good faith” efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery co-op, or any other plan they might work out by meeting with city and neighborhood residents.
Lest one thinks this is some heavy-handed City Hall intervention, the ordinance makes clear that owners still retain the ultimate power to close their store. It also creates a number of exemptions to the six-month notice requirement. If a store is closing because of a natural disaster or business circumstances that aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” it doesn’t have to provide the full six months’ notice.
Still, should stores close without providing the proper notice, persons affected by the closure would be entitled to sue the closed store for damages.
Preston has been floating this ordinance since January when a Safeway in the city’s Fillmore neighborhood announced it was closing before city officials intervened to keep it open a little longer. The policy itself is decades old.
In 1984, the board of supervisors passed an identical policy to what Preston and Peskin are proposing now, but it was vetoed by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. At the time, Feinstein described the policy as “an unnecessary intrusion of governmental regulatory authority.”
Ahhh, 1984—as in, the title of Orwell’s how-to manual for contemporary “liberals,” now superceded and kinda quaint. How perfectly apropos.
Preston is more comfortable with the intrusion.
Of course he is. Gee, color me shocked—SHOCKED!
“It was a good idea then, and it’s an even better idea now,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in January.
Obviously so. I mean, any fool can see that it’s been working out so nicely for all concerned up to this point; it’s just that the original scheme didn’t go far enough, that’s all. I blame Trump, myself. Even way back when, the Orange Man was nothing but a garden-variety shitstirrer.
“We need notice, we need transparency, community input, and a transition plan when major neighborhood grocery stores plan to shut their doors.”
Know what you really need? To get government’s meddlesome mitts out of affairs not properly its own, and let private citizens engage in commerce with honest vendors as, when, and how they prefer, in accordance with A) their own free choice, and B) the laws of supply and demand.
Yeah, I know, in SF (symbolic capital of Amerika v2.0) that’s just crazy talk.
“Transparency, community input, and a transition plan.” Anybody besides me wondering just where the owner’s and/or shareholders’ needs might come into play here? Or, for the matter of it, be taken into consideration at all?
Whatever the impact of this proposed policy, it does provide a telling insight into just how much micromanagement San Francisco politicians think their city needs.
HATE SPEECH! HAAATE SPEEEEECH!! QUICK, SOMEONE ARREST THAT MAN AND LOCK HIM UP FOR TREASON, INSURRECTION, THREATENING OUR SACRED DEMOCRACY, SOMETHING!!!
(Via Ed Driscoll)
- Entries
If the store is privately held, it’ll be a corporation of some sort or at least an LLC. If it closes, whom exactly are they going to sue?
If the store is part of a chain, it was either a franchise or probably a one-store corporation owned by the chain. (I don’t have personal knowledge but I heard that this is common, specifically to limit the damage of lawsuits against one store.) Again, if the store closes, whom are they going to sue?
“…whom exactly are they going to sue?”
Whoever the lawyers determine has the most insurance, natch.
No doubt about it, they follow the money.
Would business insurance cover anything like a facially frivolous lawsuit against a closed business? I can’t imagine the premiums for a policy for “any and all legal claims up to five years after the business closes”.
I could be wrong on that. The only business insurance I’ve been involved in was the boilerplate policies for very small consulting companies.
Beats me, but our insurance wouldn’t cover that kind of thing. Suing you because you closed the business?
It will not stand up in court once the constitution is considered.
Good Lord what fresh hell is this BS
and these idgits truly think this is proper, their supporters do as well, i freakin cant stand this flavor of leftist, just mental
OK, so this will discourage businesses from opening in the first place, because laws can get more inclusive – why just grocery stores? And since it’s a city ordinance, the case probably gets tried in municipal court. Say they win and get a huge judgment? Who is going to have the leverage to collect it? And that’s one store that will never come back… I guess they’ll all have to shop in Silicon Valley, or Marin, or Palo Alto, or someplace, hope they leave lots of shit on the sidewalk, those places will have enough money to clean it up…
Maybe they leave it as a placeholder, ‘open’ like some soviet-era store, with a meagre selection of dented cans and nothing else.
Self service as well. Put the money in the basket for the dented cans. Nothing will accrue, but nothing is anyway.
It’s a good idea, especially if they own the property.
Bills Of Attainder remain unconstitutional in 50 states and 7 US territories.
This is moot before they even pass it.
Grocery stores should retaliate by leaving San Franshitco en masse, across the board, and refusing to do business with the city and any agencies specifically until the city council apologizes, and passes a 100-year moratorium on any further regulations against them.
Until them, let them eat homeless shit.
They’ll kowtow to the grocers in about 15 minutes, the second the stores all ship out.
San Franshitco is a gloriously compact and easy target for such a move, and such a boycott would be a prudent and salutary move to would-be communist petty tyrants.
They’d probably get every major chain merchant to leave as well in about an hour, which would domino to making the great Turd By The Bay an object lesson in the limits of hubris and tyranny.
“Grocery stores should retaliate…”
In corporations run by people that are not cowards they would already be leaving. There are very few people at the heads of large corporations that are not owned.
True, but they all answer to boards.
All they have to do is wave “Best interests of our shareholders“, which BTW is federal law, and the petty dictators in Frisco would be left swinging their johnsons at the breeze.
Which is about all they’ve done about their problems to date, anyways.
Those companies are too chickenshit to do it still, but that, and only that, is the sole reason why they haven’t already shuttered their businesses in Frisco already, lock, stock, and barrel.
“Those companies are too chickenshit to do it still…”
Yes, their boards are as bad as rest of them.