Waffle House CEO slams decision-makers of lockdown measures to restrict indoor dining
The Waffle House CEO Walt Ehmer pushed back against decision-makers saying, "The people making the decisions are not paying the same price that the workers in this country are paying,"
Walt Ehmer, the famous Waffle House CEO, took a stand against lockdown measures that force indoor dining to be closed to the public. In his push against the measures, he cites the harm it does to the workers these measures effect instead of the business.
In the Business Insider interview, Ehmer said, “A lockdown is going to put a lot of people out of work,”.
“It’s really not about the business — it’s about the people. These people have jobs, they have livelihoods, they need to take care of their families.”
Ehmer pointed out an important point that so often gets overlooked by many of those who make the lockdown decisions, “The people making the decisions are not paying the same price that the workers in this country are paying,” Ehmer added. “We’re trying to provide reliable careers and jobs for people.”
“None of the people who make the decisions to shut down businesses and impact people’s livelihoods ever have their own livelihood impacted,”
The famous American business has approximately 1,920 locations in 25 states. In March, due to the coronavirus pandemic, 418 locations were forced shut and 40,000 workers were out of work. At the time, sales were about 30% of what they normally would be.
While the pandemic ravaged on, nearly 700 locations were temporarily shuttered during the first lockdowns.
The CEO does not want to revert back to what happened to the business in the first half of the virus. Currently, all but two of the 1,920 locations are serving food indoors.
CEO Ehmer continued saying, “The only reason we think that we would shut a dining room down at this point is if the local government made us do so,”.
Ehmer is not a typical CEO as Business Insider noted, during the zoom interview he was wearing the same uniform polo as restaurant workers and works alongside his employees on the grill.
He believes that “The true way to solve a crisis is to go stand in the middle of it, and figure out how to take care of people and figure out how to help put things back together,”
The Waffle House says there has not been a single instance of COVID spread in any of its restaurants and that they have taken all the necessary precautions to ensure the safety of its workers and clients.
“We work side by side with folks. I’m not going to work in an unsafe environment and I’m not going to let our folks work in an unsafe environment.”
During the early stages of the pandemic, Ehmer and the Waffle House senior management all slashed their own pay from 50% to 60%. The company also had to reduce wages from managers down to grill cooks, who had to take a $1 pay cut to avoid bankruptcies. While servers lost hours when indoor dining closed.
Since then, workers’ salaries have been restored and 95% of Waffle House employees are back at work.
Ehmer is skeptical that the government would be able to keep its word on proposals that claim the government will pay restaurants to stay closed and keep workers on the payroll.
“The stimulus helped a lot of restaurants and more importantly a lot of people early on,… But, what you can’t value enough is someone’s peace of mind and security that they have a job that they can count on. Governments can’t replace all of the salaries in the economy that you want to shut down. We’ve got to find safe ways to move forward.”
Ehmer and other restaurant owners across the states and Canada remain in the belief that these sort of lockdown policies fail to take people’s lives and livelihoods into consideration.
In Canada, a considerable list of larger retail and restaurant businesses are set for closure, while last April a report showed that 50% of independent Canadian restaurants were on the brink of foreclosure due to the COVID lockdowns.
A Toronto pub recently aired its resentment on Twitter toward policy-makers over the lockdown in Toronto.
With more lockdowns being announced, it is unclear how businesses will stay afloat with accumulating rent and debt.