The pizza gestapo are coming, according to a new report from the National Review.
A little-known provision in the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) is about to come into effect, and it could sink pizza franchises nationwide.
The regulation would require restaurant chains with twenty or more locations to post nutritional information for every item on the menu and every variation of item on the menu.
Domino’s executives figured out that there are over 34 million different combinations of toppings for their pizzas. That’s a big sign -- and an expensive one. Domino’s are owned and operated by individual businesspeople, and each new sign could cost as much as $5,000, a crippling sum for restaurants already operating on a shoestring budget.
As the National Review reports:
“We did the math,” says Tim McIntyre, an executive at Domino’s and chairman of (not making this up) the American Pizza Community, a thing that exists. “With gluten-free crusts to thick to hand-tossed to pan pizza, multiple sizes, cheeses, toppings . . . there are about 34 million possible combinations.” He does a pretty good deadpan delivery: “That is difficult to put on a menu.”
That’s going to be a big sign.
Not that anybody is ever going to use it. The great majority of Domino’s orders are placed over the Internet and almost all the rest are placed by phone. The number of people who walk into a Domino’s outlet, look at a menu, and order a pizza is relatively small, representing only a few percentage points of Domino’s customers. Other pizza chains see roughly the same thing.
So the signs are going to be largely useless, but they’re also kind of expensive, “Useless + Expensive” being the classic federal regulatory equation. McIntyre estimates a price between $3,500 and $5,000 per location. That isn’t very much to a big corporation like Domino’s, but the Domino’s corporation doesn’t operate all those Domino’s shops: Those are franchises, run by independent owner-operators."
This regulation is yet another example of how Obamacare seeks to control the lives of everyday Americans while actually making those lives worse. The American people would rather pay less for insurance packages they’ll actually use. They’d rather have jobs at pizza restaurants and figure out the nutrition information for themselves than have no jobs at all.
That’s why a Convention of States is so crucial to our nation’s future. If the current Congress manages to repeal Obamacare, the next overreaching health care law might be even worse. A Convention of States can propose constitutional amendments that will ensure the disaster that is Obamacare never happens again.
