If at first they don’t succeed…
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Ahhh, 1984—as in, the title of Orwell’s how-to manual for contemporary “liberals,” now superceded and kinda quaint.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)