Restrictive Scheduling Bill Will Put the Freeze on My Ice Cream Shop

My name is Erika Thomas and I make amazing ice creams. Nine years ago, I opened my first ice cream shop, High Point Creamery. Since then, I’ve grown the business to include three High Point Creamery locations, an ice cream truck, and a sister coffee and ice cream shop called Eiskaffee. I currently employ about fifty people — and in the summer, it’s closer to eighty people.

Since opening the ice cream shops, I have employed hundreds of high school and college students and have taught them what it means to have their first job: how to be responsible for their own schedule, what it means to give great service, and even the proper way to clean a toilet.

Along the way, my high school students have become college students who’ve come back to us summer after summer. My very first junior scoopers are now marketing execs, therapists and MBA graduates.

The way I’ve been able to support them is to let them set their own availability that works best for them. I pay for a scheduling app in which employees can enter their availability and the number of hours they want to work. We then give them their schedules — two weeks in advance. In the nearly ten years of schedules that I have posted, I have never, not one time, had a schedule where all the employees showed up or didn’t offer up their shift or trade it with someone else. Not once. Ever.
People want restaurant and service jobs so they can have flexibility. HB23-1118 – the restrictive scheduling bill – will kill that. I will be forced to move my people to full-time salaried employees, with a set schedule and no ability to switch shifts. Other restaurants have tried that, and those restaurants have since gone out of business or vastly exploited their salaried workers; in many cases, salaried restaurant employees work upwards of eighty hours weekly. We pay our employees hourly to ensure that every employee is paid overtime if they work more than forty hours and can have a schedule that works for them. This bill will remove employee choice.

As things return to “normal,” nothing is normal. Our last normal year was 2019, and since then, minimum wage has gone up 55 percent. Butterfat, the main ingredient in my delicious ice creams, is up 45 percent. There’s a worldwide paper shortage, and vanilla is now $1,000 a gallon. The list goes on and on. This has made my already thin margins even thinner.

To pile on the butterfat, we have the lowest unemployment rate in fifty years. The Sick Pay law was enacted, so we’re still paying out eighty hours of COVID pay (without the ability to ask for proof of illness), and payroll taxes just went up another 5 percent.

Here’s the good news: Capitalism works. On average, my staff makes well over $25 an hour. Yes, this includes my high schoolers. We already treat our staff like gold. If someone calls out on a Saturday morning and no one wants to pick up the shift, we start offering incentives: If you pick up this shift, I’ll add $20… $30… anyone for $50? Employees are already being compensated. And look, if we don’t treat them right or they’re annoyed with us, they quit. Trust me, they can go next door and have another job by the end of the day.

A recent headline in the Washington Post reads: “Restaurants can’t find workers, nearly 2 million hospitality jobs go unfulfilled.” This. Was. Last. Week. This bill will not protect employees; it’s a job killer and will put a final nail in the coffin of the chronically understaffed restaurant industry.

I’ll pivot my business once again and will look at vending machines and robots.

In the meantime, I ask you to protect my employees and keep employee choice alive by calling your Colorado senators and representatives and asking them to vote against this job-killing, restaurant- destroying, no-ice-cream-for-you bill. The House Business Committee is holding hearings and a vote on Thursday, February 16, so a call or email to your representative could help kill the bill.

And don’t we all want nice things? Like extra fudge sauce and rainbow sprinkles!

Erika Thomas is the owner of Eiskaffee and High Point Creamery, which has three locations in Denver.

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