Thursday, August 9, 2012

Shove your ingredients and your pizza, Papa John

Hey, Papa John, you can feed a child for just 10 cents a day... or give all your employees health insurance for just 14 cents a pizza!

I would gladly pay 14 cents extra per pizza if I knew that it allowed employees at the restaurant to get medical insurance.  Hell, it's customary to tip the delivery guy $5, so what's a few extra cents?

However, after "Papa" John Schnatter has publicly opposed Obamacare, I can assure you I won't be ordering any more of his pizzas.  

Sorry, but there are just not that many great jobs out there nowadays; and for some people, working at Papa Johns or McDonald's is their career.  Papa John and the rest of us can no longer assume, condescendingly, that workers in industries like fast food deserve s**tty wages and zero benefits.  It's just plain mean-spirited and un-American.

As for Papa John's and Chic-Fil-A, there are a plentiful substitutes in the market and not a lot of difference between products.  So you know what?  Branding counts.  Image matters.  Corporate social responsibility means something.  And so I relish the right to punish those companies who pay their workers s**t and then turn around and give their wealth to backwards-lame conservative causes.  I urge all of you to do the same.  Papa John isn't the first or last guy to bake a pizza.  Chic-Fil-A didn't invent the chicken sandwich.  These establishments are just as "replaceable" as the minimum-wage workers that they treat like crap.


By Barry Bradford
August 7, 2012 | Huffington Post

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