Congratulations to this week’s Comment Contest winner - Estes Mills.

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You know how politicians and bureaucrats are always lamenting the fact that there are not more women who run their own businesses? Could the following be one of the reasons more women do not go into business?

Let’s say you’re a woman and you do decide to open a coffee shop, and it grows to 29 stores thanks to you hiring attractive, outgoing young women to serve the coffee while wearing snug, pink t-shirts. You better watch out because the goobers in the the government might decide to pay you a visit.

Marylou’s hit with discrimination inquiry
Coffee house chain bitter over federal ‘witch hunt’

South Shore coffee chain Marylou’s is singing the blues over a federal employment-discrimination investigation, crying foul that the feds are going after its long-standing practice of hiring bubbly young bombshells to peddle the shop’s trademark joe.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been quietly probing Marylou’s’ hiring practices for nearly a year, the Herald has learned, with investigators pulling reams of job applications, interviewing company brass and grilling the 29-store chain’s pink-clad clerks about their co-workers’ gender, age, race and body type, according to the company.

Marylou’s execs deny any discrimination.

“We have never had a complaint against us for age discrimination or any kind of discrimination,” founder Marylou Sandry wrote in a plea for help to state Sen. John F. Keenan (D-Quincy). “We feel that the EEOC is on a witch hunt.”

EEOC officials would not comment, and Keenan said he would not intervene in the federal agency’s ongoing investigation.

Sandry declined to comment, other than to say, “I don’t want to say anything. I just want it to be over with.”

Company vice president Ronnie Sandry told the Herald that Marylou’s hiring is limited by its pool of applicants, who tend to be young women from the heavily white South Shore.
“When you’re hiring a police officer, certain people show up,” Sandry said. “When you’re hiring a Patriots cheerleader, certain people show up. When we’re hiring, certain people apply, and we have no control over it.”

Katherine J. Michon, a Boston lawyer who specializes in discrimination cases, said the length and scope of the investigation indicates the feds are serious about cracking down on the company.

“It sounds like they’re trying to explore every possible protected category to see if there is a race-discrimination case, a sex-discrimination case or an age-discrimination case … whether people are being chosen for the position because they’re white, young and female,” Michon said.

According to Sandry, EEOC officials told the company the investigation started over Marylou’s local TV spots, in which perky young baristas prance about and sing the company’s bluesy jingle boasting that its roast is “the best coffee in town.”

 Click Here to read the rest of the story.

Apparently, the EEOC thinks business owners should not have the right to hire those people they think will give them the best chance of making the business successful.

What I want to know is why a government on verge of bankruptcy is wasting tax dollars investigating a successful business that nobody complained about. Did some tight-ass prude in the agency catch the store’s commercial and decide pretty girls singing and dancing, or whatever they were doing, just wasn’t right? Perhaps so. A local talk show host opined:

The problem is that people are happy. They like being served by fun, attractive people. Men in particular like being served by fun, attractive women.  And that’s why it’s bad. You’re not SUPPOSED to like it. 

You’re supposed to be just as content being served by a Roseanne Barr as you would be a Reese Witherspoon. And if you’re not, you’re a bad person.

Instead of sending Marylou’s a note of thanks for providing jobs for lots of people in their 29 stores so the stores and employees can pay taxes to provide the EEOC bureaucrats with cushy jobs, inflated salaries, and great benefits, they harass them. It’s insane. It’s is the kind of thing that happens when government grows so big and bloated that bureaucrats have to do something, anything, no matter how frivolous or foolish, to justify their budgets

Maybe Our Dear Leader will take pity on Marylou’s and stop by for a cup of coffee the next time he’s here in The People’s Republic.

If Michelle let’s him, of course.

What do you think about this story?

If you’re a woman, would this kind of treatment dissuade you from taking the risk of opening a business?

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