Makini Howell, Small Business Owner, on the Importance of Public Protections

Makini Howell
Seattle, Washington

I own a group of small restaurants, they have various names, one of them is Plum, the other one is Sage, and we’ve been in business for thirty years. It started as a small family business, and we’ve grown substantially and I just really wanted to talk about why regulations are important for our business, especially a food based business.

We need our produce inspected. We don’t want things like E. coli slipping in to our lettuce when customers come in. These things are very important in order to keep standards and keep the quality of food high so our customers have a good experience when they come in. We want them to tell someone else they had a good experience in our restaurant. We want them to be return customers. If customers don’t come back that will only slow the growth of the economy and it will slow the growth of small businesses like mine.

Cutting back on our vital system of safeguards is a bad idea. If you start to deregulate everything, there are no rules. We don’t need a wild, wild west style of doing business.

What we need are comprehensive safeguards for businesses to thrive. And, I would like to point out, that Wall Street was deregulated and you see what the consequences of that are.

So I would definitely take a second look at whether or not you’re going to deregulate everything and really look at the benefits of safeguards, which is what regulations really are.

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Thanks to the Main Street Alliance for connecting us with Makini.