Two San Francisco-area lawmakers placed a new proposal on the fall voting docket that would make it unlawful for new companies opening in the city to include free employee cafeterias.
All 51 companies that already include such cafeterias, such as Google, Twitter, and Levi Strauss & Co., would be unaffected by the new proposal should it be voted into law.
The local politicians, Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Aaron Peskin, along with Golden Gate Restaurant Association’s Executive Director Gwyneth Borden, announced their proposal in a press conference this week, Forbes reported.
“The economic vitality of San Francisco’s streets is related to the ground floor experience — active storefronts that promote pedestrian traffic and drive retail transactions,” Borden said. “In all our commercial zoning areas, buildings are zone mixed-use, ground floor retail/restaurant with office above. This only works if the office use supports the ground floor retail.”
She added that it’s impossible to compete with free food.
A local restaurant owner, just blocks away from city hall in San Francisco, said that local businesses are suffering a loss of thousands of potential customers because of tech companies’ tendency to include a free cafeteria.
“We see thousands of employees in a block radius that don’t go out to lunch and don’t go out in support of restaurants every day,” Ryan Cole, owner of the restaurant Corridor, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s because they don’t have to.”
He added the when the payment processing company Square closes its free cafeteria every other Friday, the restaurant experiences such a surge in business that it sometimes has to schedule additional staff.
Many restaurant owners in the area said that they saw an increase in restaurant closures since tech companies, which have flooded the area in the past decade, have begun to include free lunches in its benefits for employees.
