After being released from job lock, the employees can become artists and street performers.
Via Daily Signal:
If you ask Tom Loventhal, a deli is no more than a place to provide customers with comfort food.
Whether it’s breakfast—served all day—soup or a sandwich, Loventhal’s motto has always been that at his Nashville, Tenn.,-based deli, “anyone is welcome here from ages 0 to 99, because you’ll find something on the menu.”
And for nearly two decades, Loventhal has stayed true to his motto at his restaurant, Noshville Authentic New York Delicatessen (“nosh” meaning to eat), where he’s kept more than half of the same employees on the payroll for at least 10 years and one-quarter of his workers for nearly 15 years.
Loventhal of course has his regulars, who he says come into the deli at least four times a week and take their usual seats at the counter, and he’s seen three generations of customers—the parents had kids, and now those same kids are having kids.
“The loyalty, people just come back,” he told The Daily Signal. “We have good service and consistent good food. It’s just a fun place to come in and eat.”
But come Dec. 27, the midtown Nashville location of the restaurant, one of two Loventhal owns, will be closing its doors in part because of Obamacare, he said.
“Having more than 50 full-time employees means you have to comply with the Affordable Care Act, and it was an unknown risk of how much it was going to cost,” he told The Daily Signal. “But it was going to be significant, and take a lot of time and labor to take care of the transition and the reporting and the forms.”
Loventhal originally planned to shutter the location within the first few months of 2016 after a developer purchased the building where Noshville’s has sat for the last 19 years.
But when Loventhal learned he would be faced with the added expense of providing his more than 50 employees with health insurance come Jan. 1—he estimated it would cost between $70,000 and $100,000 annually—Loventhal decided to close Noshville’s doors before the provision of Obamacare overseeing businesses, the employer mandate, goes fully into effect.
“It’s an onerous bill, and for a small business, it’s a lot of time [to comply],” he said. “I’ve been studying this for three years, and I really couldn’t come up with a good answer, and I feel sorry for closing this business.”