Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. | THE COLLINE GATE

Don
Illuminati

Posts: 1,547

Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. Feb 15, 2019 7:07:46 GMT -5

Post by Don on Feb 15, 2019 7:07:46 GMT -5

How someone can be as economically obtuse as Ron Shaich is, to me, simply incomprehensible. Can somebody explain his irrationality to me?

Panera has announced that it will close the last of its charitable stores, which allowed people to pay whatever they wished for a meal, because it was costing too much dough.

The Boston store will shut its doors permanently February 15. “Panera Cares” were indistinguishable from other Panera eateries in their branding, menu, or furnishings, except they announced that no one would be turned away if they did not pay one cent of the “suggested prices.” Those who could not afford to pay full price could volunteer for an hour at the store in exchange for the food.

The perfect socialist dream, right? It's right out of the playbook. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." According to Panera's founder, this was intended as an object lesson for the skeptics.

Panera founder Ron Shaich said part of his motivation in opening the stores was “torturing the cynics, who were arguing” customers would pour in to enjoy “lunch on Uncle Ron.”

So how'd that turn out? Long story short, customers poured in to enjoy "lunch on Uncle Ron." Seems the "cynics" were right.

Swarms of high school students helped themselves to lunch each Monday through Friday. The homeless dined there every meal, every day.

So Panera instituted measures to keep high school students out during lunch, and to educate the homeless that Panera was not a soup kitchen. In yet another example of "eat your young," SJWs began to trash Panera for the efforts they made to continue this selfless dedication to charity.

Customers complained on Yelp that Panera used other disincentives to prevent misuse or overuse, including publicly shaming poor and elderly customers. Employees were accused of profiling, and Shaich ordered them to undergo “sensitivity training.”

Even with these efforts, the continued losses, as well as increasing neighborhood crime rates and homeless shooting up in the restrooms spelled doom for the program.

So did founder Ron Shaich learn anything? Apparently not. He claims the experiment was a success in an amazing display of either duplicity or economic ignorance.

The closures of every single store due to insufficient funds “by no means means that this wasn’t a success,” he said.

Yet he did have an opportunity to learn something, if only he had listened to himself. He described the following incident earlier in the article.

I can literally remember a couple of kids – local kids walked into our store in Clayton, Mo. And they walked up to the counter kind of laughing. And they said, I’ll have three smoothies and two roast beef sandwiches. And here’s my dad’s credit card. Put three bucks on it.

I just wanted to jump over that counter, and I wanted to grab the kid around the neck and whack him. And I just wanted to say, don’t you get it – right? – somebody else has got to pay.

How in the world is it that people who believe in socialism don't get those last six words? How can Ron Shaich ignore, or pretend to ignore, the life lesson that young punk handed him?

Or are people like Ron Shaich and AOC simply crazy like a fox? After all, we've seen that lies repeated often enough become canon.

I'm beginning to believe it's the latter.

Last Edit: Feb 15, 2019 7:08:19 GMT -5 by Don

____________________________________________________
Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke
"It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don
The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don
The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don
____________________________________________________

Quote

robeiae
Thaumaturge

On a down bound train

Posts: 6,692

Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. Feb 15, 2019 9:36:29 GMT -5 Don likes this

Post by robeiae on Feb 15, 2019 9:36:29 GMT -5

Yeah, this is a first-rate object lesson on human nature and economic decision-making. It's amazing--imo--that someone who has a lot of business sense can talk themselves into believing this sort of fantasy idea will actually work.

Here's the transcript from the NPR interview/round table: www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=686660129

From it, the full "cynics" quote:

I fundamentally believed that there were enough good people in the world that they would do the right thing. But I particularly loved torturing the cynics, who were arguing, you know, no way this would work. Everybody - you know, it would be lunch on Uncle Ron.

That really is hysterical, Shaich imagining that he was "torturing" people who thought his idea wouldn't work. They weren't being tortured, they were--and still are--laughing at him.

Also from the above bit is this, from the host (speaking about Giana Eckhardt's point of view):

Yep, there are no ethical consumers. Giana says how people feel about a social issue, like hunger, and how they behave in the marketplace are two totally different things, meaning, like, I can hate sweatshops, but I might still buy a pair of tennis shoes that - from a brand that uses sweatshop labor.

That's so obviously true, yet people have a hard time admitting it to themselves. So many today like to pretend they're "ethical consumers" because they've signed on to this boycott or that boycott, but it's all just for show, even if they can't realize it.

So too for Shaich's model: the degree to which it "works" is simply reflective of how much a limited base will--for whatever period of time--talk themselves into behaving "ethically." And that amount of "working" can be undone by particular circumstances that throw the whole thing off (like the high school crowd).

But look at this piece at Vox, which bends over backwards to not shit on Shaich and ends the article with this swill:

Despite Shaich’s best intentions, Panera Cares was a temporary solution to the symptoms — not the causes — of poverty and inequality.

That's why people can keep being economically ignorant: because they never really get called out fully for their ignorance; they still get glad-handed and congratulated for their efforts.

Quote

Don
Illuminati

Posts: 1,547

Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. Feb 15, 2019 11:04:00 GMT -5

Post by Don on Feb 15, 2019 11:04:00 GMT -5

You know, I could understand the glad-handing if this were the first time this sort of thing had ever been tried and the results were economically surprising. However, after eighty bazillion examples have already been illustrated in the real world, with no evidence to the contrary, you'd think people would quit "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Isn't that the definition of insanity?

That's why I'm starting to believe it's more intentional evil than ignorance.

____________________________________________________
Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke
"It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don
The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don
The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don
____________________________________________________

Quote

Optimus
Illuminati

Posts: 2,508

Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. Feb 15, 2019 12:18:18 GMT -5

Post by Optimus on Feb 15, 2019 12:18:18 GMT -5

I think trying to somehow tie this to AOC is a bit of a stretch. Her positions are about using government programs to provide support and welfare, not about bankrupting one's private business essentially by giving away free soup and bread because that person was stupid enough to believe that the world was full of Care Bears and gumdrop waterfalls.

The Panera thing is an example of a naive idiot failing to understand the intersection of selfish human nature, poverty, and capitalism, not about governmental socialist programs.

It's fine to criticize AOC on her actual policy positions, and I think there are a lot on the far-left who have completely unrealistic perceptions of reality and have offered really dumb solutions to dire problems.

But viewing anything that even smells of a hint of being "socialism" (despite its arguable level of congruence to that issue) and dragging AOC into it is about as weak and trite of a tactic as someone on the left seeing anything remotely racist somewhere in the world and blaming Trump.

The "take that Socialist libtards!" take on this is a fallacious false equivalence.

Quote

Vince524
Illuminati

Eating bacon

Posts: 2,009

Another teachable moment AOC and her minions will ignore. Feb 15, 2019 12:32:32 GMT -5

Post by Vince524 on Feb 15, 2019 12:32:32 GMT -5

Feb 15, 2019 12:18:18 GMT -5 Optimus said:

I think trying to somehow tie this to AOC is a bit of a stretch. Her positions are about using government programs to provide support and welfare, not about bankrupting one's private business essentially by giving away free soup and bread because that person was stupid enough to believe that the world was full of Care Bears and gumdrop waterfalls.

The Panera thing is an example of a naive idiot failing to understand the intersection of selfish human nature, poverty, and capitalism, not about governmental socialist programs.

It's fine to criticize AOC on her actual policy positions, and I think there are a lot on the far-left who have completely unrealistic perceptions of reality and have offered really dumb solutions to dire problems.

But viewing anything that even smells of a hint of being "socialism" (despite its arguable level of congruence to that issue) and dragging AOC into it is about as weak and trite of a tactic as someone on the left seeing anything remotely racist somewhere in the world and blaming Trump.

The "take that Socialist libtards!" take on this is a fallacious false equivalence.

I was wondering that myself. When I saw the thread, I thought it was going to be over the Amazon deal for NY

thehill.com/policy/technology/430050-ocasio-cortez-celebrates-amazon-cancelling-new-york-offices-anything-is

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday celebrated Amazon's decision to cancel its plans to build a second headquarters in New York City.

"Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world," Ocasio-Cortez, one of the deal's staunchest critics, wrote.

Because people in NY don't need jobs and the revenue this would have brought in.

Quote