Tag Archives: Restaurants

Your can hardly get any customers to visit your restaurant now?

December 28, 2023 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I know! We’ll increase the sales tax so nobody comes to your restaurant at all anymore.

No need to thank us. We’re from the government and we’re here to help.

German budget woes trigger disaster warnings for restaurants – Owners who oppose return to higher pre-pandemic VAT rate are dismissed as scaremongers by economists.

Kemal Üres, owner of a tapas bar in Hamburg, has spent the past year telling his social media followers that thousands of businesses like his will be destroyed by a planned tax increase.

The man who calls himself the “Gastroflüsterer”, or restaurant whisperer, is campaigning to make the pandemic-era cut in value added tax on restaurant meals permanent. Otherwise, the German government’s decision to raise VAT from the 7 per cent rate in place since 2020 back up to 19 per cent in January would lead to higher prices, job cuts and as many as 30,000 bankruptcies, he said.

And They Speak Such Funny Englisch, Too

August 15, 2017 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

“It drives me up the wall the way waiters in Berlin restaurants only speak English,” one popular German politician has recently been quoted as saying. In Berlin. In German.

English

And I couldn’t agree more. Although the German government may have made it compulsory for asylum seekers to learn German, this rule unfortunately does not apply to EU residents and others who have come here to live and work and, well, it’s understandable that some Germans are mad as hell about it and aren’t going to take it anymore.

The English these waiters speak, you see, is often done so by natives (UK folks, Canadians, Australians, even the occasional US-Amerikaner or two) and therefore practically impossible for most Germans to understand.

“Vat do they mean with ‘coming right up’ or ‘you bet?’ Vat does betting have to do wis my order? If zhey are going to speak zheir language here zhey should at least have the decency to do so properly, verdammt nochmal!”

Germans are too relaxed on the issue and that it would never happen in Paris.