“Beloved San Francisco burger joint will close after 40 years after wheelchair user sued over obstacles that stopped him entering, with owners saying they’re too poor to build a ramp”, the Daily Mail reports.
A beloved San Francisco burger joint has closed its doors after a wheelchair user sued the restaurant over a ‘high threshold’ that prevented him from entering.
After 38 years of operation, the Great American Hamburger & Pie Co.’s Post in Richmond, California, bid farewell to its longtime customers on Thursday, with the lawsuit being the final blow.
‘Two harsh years of COVID, high food inflation, and a recent ADA compliance lawsuit have taken a toll on our small family business,’ owners George and Helen Koliavas announced the closure.
COVID, high food inflation and a ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliance lawsuit: the last five years in America illustrated in three snapshots. Change the name of the disability “rights” law, and the same story could be told a thousand times for small businesses in the UK and the EU. The article continues,
A paraplegic man filed suit against the Koliavas and their landlord in January after encountering a ‘high threshold’ on two visits to the burger joint last year.
On both occasions, the threshold blocked his wheelchair from entering the restaurant, prompting him to hire an ‘accessibility expert’ to conduct an informal investigation.
According to the lawsuit, the expert found a lack of wheelchair access throughout the space.
‘It’s frustrating, and you get to a point where you say, ‘You know what, forget it,” said George.
When I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged many years ago, I could see why people admired the book, but the portrait of Mr Thompson’s America never quite gelled with me. Perhaps I needed to see America led by a man such as Joe Biden.
Joe Biden ain’t leading anyone anywhere, apart from leading us all up the garden path to see the fairies.
The ADA act and all the similar things were tools enacted by lawyers for lawyers… And, the end result will be worse services for the handicapped, because the businesses won’t be there at all.
I’d take all these assholes out and leave them somewhere in the wilderness, all by themselves. The audacity of what goes on with this crap is amazing; there’s more than a few “disabled” in California that make their living by suing businesses for these insane accessibility claims. Which was not the intent, at least on paper, of the legislation.
We’re all diminished by this bullshit, in the final analysis. Something that nobody seems to care about, but, hey… At least we paid lip service to the needs of the minority handicapped.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law by President George Herbert Walker Bush (a nice man – but not someone with a deep ideological understanding of the cultural and political war going on in the Western world).
The courts have long declared (since World War II just about anything is treated as “interstate commerce” even growing food in your backyard) that there is no limit on either the regulations or the spending of the Federal government.
And both California and the city of San Francisco are also insane in their policies.
The astonishing thing is not that American society is collapsing (of course it is collapsing) – the astonishing thing is that it has taken so many decades of insane policies to undermine American society – “it takes a great deal, over a long period of time, to undermine a great nation”.
The situation in California is hopeless – California can not be saved, the mathematics is clear.
As for the United States generally there is a small, small, chance that America can be saved – if the 2024 election is rigged, as the 2020 Presidential election was rigged, then “small chance” – becomes “no chance at all”.
Please do not mistake me – I am NOT saying that if Donald John Trump returns America is saved, no. The situation is that, if he returns as President, there is a small chance that America will be saved – and no-chance-at-all if the Progressives remain in power (with Puppet Biden or some other Puppet).
The objective of the international elite is for society (the people) to be dominated by the technocratic state and vast “partner corporations”.
Their vision is a sort of Science Fiction H.G. Wells world – like “The Shape Of The Things To Come”, or the dreams of Henri Saint-Simon a century earlier.
In reality what they will create is a waste land.
Richmond, CA isn’t San Francisco. It’s in the East Bay, across the SF Bay from SF.
Four years ago i was reading in Fortune a weekly column ” Only in America”. In San Francisco, a strip tease joint owner was successfully fined because it was not possible for an handicapped strip tease girl to access the platform where she had to perform.. As an Belgian lawyer I thought it was indeed only in America and very funny. Now i am not sure any more for the only America part. And it is not funny any more ..
I long ago gave up even remarking on the number of times that I found myself inside a secret, secure government facility, guarded by barbed wire, floodlights, sensors, barricades and many, many young men with guns, and seeing that the bathroom doors had signs in braille. Some economist should do a study to determine the actual benefits that disabled people realize from all these various accomodations versus the overall societal cost of making them into the default that must be always provided everywhere. No solutions, only trade-offs.
llater,
llamas
@llamas,
Oh, it gets even more stupid. The US Army built all-new barracks for the troops starting back around 1990. Those barracks? All of them? All were designed to be ADA-compliant. Everywhere. All the offices, all the barracks rooms, everything.
Last I looked, the Army wasn’t putting people who needed wheelchairs into active-duty combat units. Anyone needing that level of assistance was theoretically only ever going to be assigned to a medical-care unit, and only for as long as it took to prepare them for medical retirement. You absolutely do not need ADA-compliant bathrooms on the third floor of a barracks, but we had them in every room. What was funniest about it? There weren’t any elevators or any means of getting a wheelchair up to those floors, either… Which, they’d waivered. Bathrooms, however? Non-negotiable.
No idea what that added to the bill, but it could not have been cheap. Utterly pointless; I asked about them having wheelchair lifts for the tactical vehicles, but couldn’t keep a straight face long enough…
The brass was unappreciative of my levity.
In recent years my business partner and I have been spending large amounts of our time on voluntary work.
We know from first hand experience that some disabled people are also complete see you on Tuesdays.
’Last I looked, the Army wasn’t putting people who needed wheelchairs into active-duty combat units.’
Yet.
Compared with Biden, Ayn Rand’s Mr. Thompson seems a model of prudence and decency.
Where is the modern “Galt’s Gulch”? How do I get there?
At worst, it’s now a state of mind only–no hope of physically moving there!
At best, there is a secret valley somewhere south of 80 degrees North.
Or can we somehow create small “Gulch’s” in our own towns and cities?
Kirk:
This attitude problem is why you never made general. There is never any argument against a new procurement project, whether it be a rifle or a potty.
feral lunch lady – quite correct, the place is not in San Francisco, if it was – high rents and regulations would have destroyed it long ago. Sadly California generally is insane (it can not be saved) – and the United States is going the same way.
Philipe Hermkins – your warning that “equality” or “equity” concerns may be getting the tort law systems of other Western nations is grim indeed.
Kirk – I suspect if you made such comments now, rather than back in the 1990s, you would find yourself out of the United States Woke (Critical Theory – “Equity”) Army – but you have a closer understanding of how far the decay has (and has not) gone, than I do.
Disabled people in the military – at every high rank they may have a place, one need only think of Admiral Nelson and-so-on (but none of the famous disabled military commanders started off disabled – they were all physically fit when they first joined the military) – but in ordinary level combat, NO it is not a sensible idea.
There are reasons I never attained high rank, mostly because I lost patience for idiocy early on, and began saying what I thought. This is not a path to career success, but if you enjoy being able to say “Told ya so…” when it all caves in, and the feces is rising above your knees…? Well, it can be very satisfying.
I think a lot of this ties in with the post Natalie made about jury nullification. If you somehow manage to silence all the “little boys pointing out the Emperor’s naked ass”, well… Your civilization is likely well on its way towards self-destruction.
The greatest enemy we all face in all things isn’t the crisis du jour, but the idiot we’ve allowed to be promoted to positions of authority within our own organizations. That idiot will bring your ass down, no matter what.
You can see the idiocy inherent when you contemplate the Germans in WWII: Hitler and his moronic Führerprinzip got them places, but because he was a jumped-up corporal without much more than a feral stoat’s instincts, he eventually led them all to ruin. Most leadership is, I fear, at least somewhat sociopathic and even psychopathic. The trick is, you have to recognize that fact, nod at them when they froth at the mouth, and then quietly get the object of their wrath out of sight. Maybe tell them they were executed, or something… The thing is, that sociopathy is a tool, and you have to use it like any other tool: Carefully. Had the actual corporate leadership of the German state possessed the slightest whiff of common sense, they’d have looked at Hitler and said “Yeah, this guy’s doing all right, so far… Keep an eye on him; he gets too far off the reservation, we need to get rid of him…”
The point to have done that would have been somewhere around the time he started making really stupid and emotional decisions during Barbarossa. Had he not kept changing his mind about objectives, and had he eschewed playing to Soviet strengths at places like Stalingrad? He might have done a lot better. At any rate, the time for the German body politic to have rid themselves of his “talent” would have been somewhere before that point.
You get on a horse, you ride it until you get where you want to be. Then, you get off; we would do well to treat our leadership class similarly. Of course, the trick is to recognize just when they’ve gone off the rails, and then have the balls to act accordingly.
Guy like Elon Musk? He’ll eventually reach that point, having experienced nothing to rein him and his ego in. But, until we reach that point, by all means… Ride his ass to the stars.
The big problem with all of this is that we tend to look at these types as being infallible. They manifestly are not; you have to know when and where to let them go, and when and where to pull them back… Instead of mindless hero-worship, treating their actions and words as the writ of God, we need to say “Hey, that Bob guy… Seems to have a way about him, but keep an eye on him, too…”
I think every human endeavor suffers these things, and it’s not usually that the base of the pyramid goes corrupt and useless; it is typically the higher-ups and middle management that lose the plot. French soldiers in WWII were much as they were in WWI, and with good leadership? Would have performed much as they always have. What wasn’t there, however, was that “good leadership”.
Same with Rome. Same with just about everything, really… I’d be willing to lay you long odds that the worthies of Angkor Wat and the high lords of all those massive Mayan cities were what went wrong with those civilizations; the average guy out doing his daily necessaries was probably just as he always was. Fish rots from the head, see…?
Kirk:
To be fair to certain German army officers, they tried to kill Hitler in 1943, but the bomb they put on his plane did not go off. That would have changed things. And we all know about the failure of the 1944 plot. The fellow was lucky, it has to be said.
To GregWA, there could be an alternative. I suggested, years ago, that millions of small-government believers could move to Australia, permanently tilting the political climate here. We have libertarian parties here, so a whole continent could remake itself into a free society!
To Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray, “I suggested, years ago, …” Would it work now?
Never been there myself but I read that it’s pretty woke-left. Do your libertarian parties get their people elected and their policies enacted? Or perhaps more on point, get the other parties’ policies rescinded?
Our libertarian parties are small, but can be influential. The Liberty & Democracy Party had a candidate elected in 2013, a Peter Lyonhelm. He was active in getting policies examined, though none were rescinded.
Hey, Greg. Why don’t you create such a place? The north-west of Australia is rugged enough to provide isolation, and not much populated. I don’t think you’d need a mirage generator. Just call it a crocodile hunting camp, and nobody will want to visit!
Here is something I saw on You-tube. Slab City describes itself as the last free city in America. You might want to go.
You do NOT want to go.