Why Seattle’s Bebop Waffle Store Went Viral on Conservative Media

On November 11, Corina Luckenbach, the proprietor of West Seattle’s Bebop Waffle Store, introduced on Instagram that her pint-sized breakfast restaurant can be closing on the finish of 2024 after greater than a decade in enterprise. “We simply by no means bought again from the pandemic, not likely,” she mentioned within the direct-to-camera video. The prices of products had been going up and whereas she supported the minimal wage enhance (“I feel everybody ought to earn more money”) it was going to value her an estimated extra $32,000 a 12 months, which “is greater than I’m capable of swing.”

Bebop stayed open till December 31, when the restaurant threw an enormous New Yr’s Eve occasion to formally shut its doorways. The morning of the occasion, Luckenbach was cleansing and getting ready when a crew from native information station Fox 13 confirmed up and requested to interview her. She mentioned positive. “I simply talked. I didn’t give it some thought in any respect,” Luckenbach says. She talked about her causes for closing, and she or he talked about what it meant to be a welcoming place for LGBTQ folks. “Particularly after the election, I feel the toughest factor for me to shut has been taking away a secure place for folks,” she instructed Fox 13.

Luckenbach is much from the one Seattle restaurant proprietor who has determined to shut in the previous couple of months due to some mixture of rising prices and wages and the baseline issue of operating a small enterprise. However Bebop’s story went viral after her Fox 13 interview, receiving protection from shops that don’t usually present a lot of an curiosity in Seattle eating places. Fox Enterprise lined it. So did the New York Publish and Newsweek, even the Every day Mail. All of those conservative-leaning shops targeted on the minimal wage as the first motive for the closure; none bothered to notice that this time of 12 months when visitors slows for eating places and bars, is when plenty of these companies shut.

As Bebop’s identify ping-ponged across the web, Luckenbach started receiving messages on LinkedIn and Fb from folks apparently reveling in her unhappiness. The tone of many of those messages, she says, was, “That’s what I get, liberal hippie bitch, for voting how I vote.” Some additionally accused her of being a foul enterprise proprietor as a result of she couldn’t pay folks the brand new minimal wage and stay open. “[There was] plenty of, ‘You’re getting what you deserve’ from either side,” she says. “It was very a lot twin trolling.”

Corina Luckenbach

Corina Luckenbach

Her story resonated on conservative media, Luckenbach thinks, as a result of “it exhibits how Democrats are fucking all the pieces up and failing the folks they are saying that they’re serving to.” The truth that the minimal wage enhance contributed to the closure of a loudly and proudly queer restaurant is the proper instance, in case you are towards a excessive minimal wage, of how progressive insurance policies really damage communities.

However Luckenbach doesn’t see issues that approach. “I wish to pay $50 an hour,” she says. “I wish to pay everybody as a lot as humanly doable.” However she additionally wished to maintain costs low sufficient that her waffles had been inexpensive, and as a enterprise proprietor, she needed to make some cash herself — which all provides as much as a tough balancing act.

What she desires isn’t for the minimal wage to go down, it’s for Seattle to contemplate methods to cushion the impression of upper prices for small eating places like Bebop. “Does Seattle need small companies that may additionally pay their employees? How are you going to assist small companies when we’ve got to tackle one other $32,000 — the place does that cash come from?” she says. “How are you going to assist us cowl these prices?” One concept she has is for town to waive the gross sales tax on companies beneath a sure income threshold, which might permit them to remain aggressive with the chains which have increased revenue margins.

She doesn’t remorse doing the Fox 13 interview that made her restaurant briefly well-known. For one factor, it led to a spike in gross sales of her cookbook, which can assist her pivot into her new enterprise, the occasion house South Park Corridor. For an additional, the minimal wage enhance actually did push Bebop into closing. None of these tales placing Bebop within the highlight had been incorrect, even when they had been generally incomplete. “That is the reality of my story,” Luckenbach says. “It’s a nuanced story. And never everyone desires to incorporate all of that.”