The Ultimate Shopping Experience Inside the Biggest and Best Mall in Pakistan
The retail landscape in Pakistan has transformed dramatically in recent years, shifting from conventional bazaars to expansive, current purchasing shops. These department shops are greater than simply locations to save. They are now full-day destinations for households, pals, and vacationers. From branded stores and entertainment zones to gourmet dining and indoor theme parks, the modern mall offers something for everyone.
Among them stands a towering symbol of luxury and scale. The biggest mall in Pakistan. It's not just large in terms of space; it offers the most complete shopping and entertainment experience in the country. But which one earns the title of the largest mall in Pakistan, and what makes it the best mall in Pakistan for thousands of visitors each day.
Packages Mall is home to loads of local and international brands, multiple enjoyment options, and a huge food court docket that attracts food lovers from throughout the city.
What units it aside isn't simply its length, however its centers. From a hypermarket and cinema complex to children' play zones and luxury fashion shops, it surely has the whole lot below one roof. Whether you are a fashion enthusiast, a parent searching out a circle of relatives-friendly sports, or a foodie searching for your next favorite meal, this mall has you blanketed.
Packages Mall in Lahore to be the first-rate mall in Pakistan for the overall revel in colourful towns, Packages Mall gives an unrivaled combination of shopping, dining, entertainment, and aesthetics.
Packages Mall is domestic to high-quit fashion brands, luxury accessories, electronics stores, and family items. All organized in a spacious and fantastically designed indoors. It offers a top rate revel in without the chaos, thanks to its considerate layout, customer service, and smooth environment. Families, couples, students, and even travelers flock here day by day, making it one of the most visited malls.
One of the important highlights of Packages Mall is its seamless integration of neighborhood culture with cutting-edge layout. It celebrates Pakistani manufacturers alongside international names, presenting a properly-balanced shopping journey. The mall also hosts fashion occasions, product launches, and seasonal fairs, making each go feel like an experience in place of just a shopping journey.
No buying trip is entirely without a meals smash and the meals courtroom in the biggest and first-rate department shops in Pakistan is a destination in its very own proper. In malls like Packages Mall, Emporium Mall, and Lucky One Mall, food courts are carefully curated to offer something for anyone.
Whether you are yearning for fast meals, desi flavors, Asian delicacies, or Italian dishes, the food court gives dozens of alternatives in a smooth, vibrant, and family-friendly setting. Popular names like McDonald's, Hardee's, OPTP, KFC, Subway, and Pizza Hut sit down aspect through facet with neighborhood favorites like Biryani Express, Bundu Khan, Howdy, and The Wok.
The meals courtroom normally functions as a mass of seating, making it clean for large households or agencies to dine together. You'll also find dessert kiosks imparting gelato, waffles, shakes, and conventional Pakistani candies. In some cases, there may even be stay tuned or weekend activities that enhance the dining experience.
Beyond the meals court docket, cafes and first-rate dining eating places are scattered at some stage in the mall. These encompass international coffee chains, rooftop lounges, and intimate bistros that provide an extra relaxed place for food or meetings.
Today's pinnacle shops in Pakistan offer an awful lot greater than retail therapy. Entertainment is now an important part of the mall revel in, in particular for households. The biggest mall in Pakistan generally has a wide range of leisure centers which include multiplex cinemas, indoor amusement parks, VR gaming zones, bowling alleys, and tender play regions for children.
In Emporium Mall Lahore, as an example, there's an indoor amusement park that could be a favorite amongst young families. These enjoyment areas make malls an all-day destination, wherein households can store, consume, and play all without ever stepping outside. This aggregate of retail and endeavor is one of the key motives why modern shops are overtaking traditional purchasing facilities in recognition.
The rise of purchasing malls in Pakistan is more than just a retail trend. It's a cultural shift. With the emergence of massive shops throughout towns like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, people at the moment are transferring far from crowded traditional markets in the direction of prepared, weather-controlled, and safer buying spaces. Families do not visit malls most effectively for shopping. These locations have grown to be places to satisfy, rejoice, dine, loosen up, and even attend business meetings.
Another aspect that contributes to the appeal of the most important shops in Pakistan is their grand and cutting-edge architectural design. Walk into Packages Mall, or Lucky One Mall, and you'll be impressed by using their interior elegance. Tall ceilings, marble floors, ambient lighting fixtures, and natural spaces supply those department shops with a global appearance and experience.
From style indications and product launches to weekend concerts and kids' contests, the first-class malls in Pakistan maintain matters exciting with regular activities. Promotions are often mall-extensive, allowing consumers to enjoy offers across diverse categories — from apparel and electronics to beauty products and domestic essentials. Loyalty packages, scratch card campaigns, and lucky draws are also commonplace, making each visit potentially worthwhile.
For instance, at some point of the Almas Sale, or a Sapphire Lawn Sale, shoppers can grab premium merchandise at discounted prices. Similarly, brands like Borjan, Outfitters, and Khaadi regularly provide save-huge promotions that make the mall a bustling hub of interest.
The best mall in Pakistan is not only approximately its length or logo range — it's additionally approximately convenience, cleanliness, and protection. Top shops ensure steady parking, wheelchair accessibility, smooth restrooms, and adequate safety staff to offer a snug and worry-loose experience for traffic of every age.
Most huge department stores are placed in prime regions of huge cities, making them easy to get admission to with the aid of public or private delivery. Parking regions are spacious and nicely-prepared, regularly featuring valet offerings and committed spots for women and people with disabilities.
Additionally, the indoor environment is right for year-spherical purchasing, in particular all through severe climate conditions. Central air-conditioning, noise control, and properly-maintained public regions make contributions to an exciting ambiance, whether you're there for a fast go or a full-day outing.
No mall can be declared to be the high-quality mall in Pakistan without providing pinnacle-tier offerings in phrases of hygiene, safety, and accessibility. Fortunately, malls like Emporium, Packages, and Lucky One have raised the same old throughout the board. These malls employ skilled protection employees, have CCTV surveillance, and follow strict cleansing schedules to ensure a safe and sanitary environment.
The upward thrust of the largest mall in Pakistan has revolutionized the manner people store, dine, and spend their enjoyment time. With world-magnificence infrastructure, limitless buying options, superb food courts, and tasty entertainment centers, those shops have emerged as more than retail facilities. They are lifestyle destinations. So whether or not you are planning a shopping spree, a family dinner, or certainly an area to hang around and relax, travelling the biggest mall in Lahore or Karachi is an enjoyment you gained't need to overlook.
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Hamilton Spectator
an hour ago
- Hamilton Spectator
For Mark Carney, every decision has trade-offs — but that's not slowing him down
OTTAWA—If there is a Carney 'doctrine' taking shape more than 100 days into the prime ministership of Mark Carney, maybe it is this: get it done, and damn the details. A few short months ago, Carney was blunt: 'I am a pragmatist above all. So when I see something that's not working, I will change it.' That's what the former central banker and UN climate finance envoy said when he captured the Liberal party leadership to replace Justin Trudeau. He went on to win the 2025 federal election on his outsider's pitch to rescue the economy from the threat of Donald Trump's tariff war. Pragmatism was how he justified abrupt domestic moves: ditching the consumer carbon tax, reversing capital gains tax hikes, and lowering income taxes while jamming 'nation-building' red-tape-cutting bills through Parliament to juice the economy. Pragmatism helps explain why, in his single mandate letter to cabinet ministers, Carney told them, 'We must redefine Canada's international, commercial, and security relationships.' But in an era where Trump is the one defining Canada's closest relationship, it's not clear if Carney's pragmatism can win over the U.S. president's chaos. On Friday, the unpredictable Trump cancelled talks towards a new deal with Canada, angry at Canada's deadline Monday for Big Tech giants to pay a digital services tax. Retroactive to 2022, it would collect $2.3 billion at first, and about $900 million yearly after that. Small potatoes compared to what Carney has already put on Canada's tab. In hopes of getting along with Trump, Carney in the past week promised to ramp up Canada's spending, along with NATO allies — all under intense pressure from the U.S. president — to a whopping $150 billion a year on military and related spending, a level almost unthinkable last year, as he vows to shift Canadian economic and security ties away from America towards Europe and beyond. In a spate of a few weeks, Carney signed what he calls a new economic, security and defence partnership with the European Union, increased aid to Ukraine, hosted a G7 summit where he offered backing of Trump's leadership efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war and left a wide open runway for Trump to handle the Iran-Israel conflict as he saw fit. Carney defended his vow to lead where the U.S. does not, telling CNN it should be seen as a 'positive' not a negative reaction 'against' the U.S. or Trump. 'The way we would like to lead, the way European Union would like to lead, a number of Asian countries as well, is in a positive respect. If the U.S. is pulling back from multilateralism, as it is with respect to trade … effectively U.S. trade policy is now bilateral — if the U.S. is pulling back, there are others of us who do believe in multilateralism,' the rule of law, 'fair and open' trade, and in defence co-operation, said Carney. 'Do something,' seems to be the Carney mantra, said Kerry Buck, a former Canadian ambassador to NATO who welcomed the prime minister's commitment hit the new NATO military spending goal of five per cent of GDP. Although Justin Trudeau eventually committed to reaching the old NATO two per cent target at the end of last year's summit, he did so without a clear plan and with a 2032 timeline that was 'clearly going to damage our bilateral relations with the U.S. under Trump, where we're very vulnerable on trade,' said Buck, speaking before Trump's move Friday. In contrast, two weeks ahead of this week's NATO summit Carney accelerated action, said he'd hit two per cent this year, and at the summit adopted the bigger five per cent goal by 2035 with no hesitation. ' It was smart transactionally to do that. And I think in terms of content, it was also necessary,' Buck said. Others wonder how Carney is going to pay for it all. Questions remain about how the government will reach its two per cent promise this year, with the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer saying it can't verify Carney's plan to hit the old target. 'Some might start to think that he has a guns-before-butter kind of approach to foreign policy … a muscular foreign policy focused on defence,' but Buck said Carney had no choice, given it was 'our most vulnerable point' with the U.S. in ongoing trade talks. Forget the 'peace dividend' that Canada and other western allies hailed at the end of the Cold War, welcoming the ability to spend less on the military and more on social welfare systems. Now Carney and the other leaders challenged by Trump are embracing what NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called a 'defence dividend,' claiming that spending five per cent of GDP on defence will create 'an engine of growth for our economies, driving literally millions of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.' Carney echoed the claim, acknowledging higher military spending may one day entail federal spending trade-offs or sacrifices, but for now, 'more of it will help build our economy at the same time as it improves our defence. And we'll get the benefits.' There is more continuity than many think between Trudeau and Carney: Carney continued the imposition of counter-tariffs against the U.S. that Trudeau launched. But he has withheld tit-for-tat retaliation against the 50 per cent steel and aluminum penalties Trump levied pending the outcome of trade talks. Carney has continued Trudeau's staunch support for Ukraine and its embattled president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Carney backs a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a ceasefire in Gaza, and went so far as to sanction two Israeli cabinet ministers. Like Trudeau, Carney believes government has a role and responsibility to address climate change. That Carney has moved swiftly on foreign and defence files is partly due to the flow of the international summits that coincided with his first two months after winning the April 28 election. It's also due to the urgency of the threat posed by the 'tariff' president in the White House. Carney, though, has a view of the larger global economic imbalances and the roles of China and the U.S. in those imbalances, that he shares with leaders like France's President Emmanuel Macron, and as they try to persuade Trump to drop tariffs, Carney seeks to position Canada's critical mineral, AI and quantum computing sectors for a world in which those imbalances continue. Janice Gross Stein said it is too early to describe a Carney 'doctrine' but it's clear 'the fundamental thing for him is that he, like everyone, is defining a path to dealing with a very different United States.' Carney is of necessity pursuing a new more predictable economic and security deal with the U.S. at a time of crisis , 'but it's an eyes-open arrangement,' Stein said. 'Yes, we need to diversify our partnerships — that's not a new idea in Canadian foreign policy … and yes,' Carney is focusing especially on Europe and like-minded states, and NATO, 'but that's built in to dealing with the more demanding United States.' Stein sees a pragmatic streak too in Carney's overtures to countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia. Carney identified China as the biggest threat to Canada's national security during the federal election. But in office, he's taken steps to thaw relations and ease Beijing's penalties on Canadian agricultural products. At the same time he is moving to block Chinese steel dumping via higher tariff rates against transshipment countries — in line with U.S. concerns. He rolled out a G7 welcome mat to India's Narendra Modi as a criminal investigation struggles to probe India's role in the killing of a Canadian Sikh in Surrey. And Carney invited Saudi Arabia Crown prince Mohamed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, who declined to attend, in a week where the Saudi regime executed a journalist. Those three countries, China, India and Saudi Arabia are key economic players that are ignored at Canada's peril, said Stein. 'Where he's a pragmatist is in the recognition that every decision has trade-offs. You cannot make it a high priority to diversify your partnerships when you are the smaller next-door neighbour to a country that you are sending 75 per cent of your exports to and buying 75 per cent of everything that you buy in defence from that one country, which is the United States, and then continue to exclude others in the international community.' In parallel, said Stein, Carney is acting to ensure that Canada's economy is 'fit for purpose.' The bill to fast-track 'nation-building' development projects is part of that effort, as is his move to do 'important' consultation with Indigenous groups, but done simultaneously with other reviews, 'not sequentially,' she said. Carney is 'connecting defence, foreign policy to the Canadian economy because that's his comfort zone,' said Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. But she worries the emphasis on 'pragmatic' sends the wrong signal to countries like China, India or Saudi Arabia which will interpret it to mean Canada is ready to overlook human rights concerns in favour of doing business. Jonathan Berkshire Miller, director of foreign affairs, national defence and security policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said Carney is necessarily focused on 'two imperatives: mending the relationship with the United States and diversification from it.' And while Carney's experience gives him credibility in Washington 'where he is well known among economic and diplomatic elites,' Trump's second term makes traditional diplomatic approaches 'increasingly unrealistic,' he said. There is an inevitable geographic and economic reality, he said in a written response to the Star. 'America remains Canada's largest trading partner.' So rather than a drastic shift or severing of ties, he said, 'Expect, instead, a policy of pragmatic hedging: building multilateral ties while trying to be on balanced terms' with who is in the White House. For now, Carney may have some latitude, he believes. Increased defence spending can bring Canada greater strategic autonomy on Arctic sovereignty, cybersecurity and intelligence sharing. The narrow question is 'one of political will' where the requirements for sustained federal spending 'and public support' will be the big test, he said, particularly in an era where 'fiscal retrenchment' (Carney has vowed to bring the operating budget into balance) and 'domestic political division are the contemporary realities.' The broader question is whether Carney's pragmatic approach can secure both.
Hamilton Spectator
2 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Canada's liquefied natural gas touted — and doubted — as a green ‘transition' fuel
CALGARY - Canada's first liquefied natural gas cargoes will soon arrive on Asian shores, a milestone touted — and doubted — as a boon for global emissions-cutting efforts. 'Cleaner energy around the world is what I think about when I think about LNG,' Shell Canada country chair Stastia West said in an onstage interview at the Global Energy Show in Calgary earlier this month. Shell and four Asian companies are partners in LNG Canada in Kitimat, B.C., the first facility to export Canadian gas across the Pacific in an ultra-chilled liquid state using specialized tankers. A handful of other projects are either under construction or in development on the B.C. coast. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told the energy show that Canadian oil and gas exports can be an 'antidote' to the current geopolitical chaos. 'And it comes with an added benefit: lower global emissions. By moving more natural gas, we can also help countries transition away from higher emitting fuels, such as coal.' Smith cited a recent Fraser Institute study that suggested if Canada were to double its natural gas production, export the additional supply to Asia and displace coal there, it would lead to an annual emissions cut of up to 630 million tonnes annually. 'That's almost 90 per cent of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions each year,' Smith said. The authors of the Fraser Institute study, released in May, argued that Canada's ability to reduce emissions elsewhere should be factored into its climate policy. 'It is important to recognize that GHG emissions are global and are not confined by borders,' wrote Elmira Aliakbari and Julio Mejía. 'Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide by expanding its LNG exports.' Some experts see a murkier picture. Most credible estimates suggest that if liquefied natural gas were to indeed displace coal abroad, there would be some emissions reductions, said Kent Fellows, assistant professor of economics with the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy. But the magnitude is debatable. 'Will all of our natural gas exports be displacing coal? Absolutely not. Will a portion of them be displacing coal? Probably, and it's really hard to know exactly what that number is,' he said. Fellows said there's a good chance Canadian supplies would supplant other sources of gas from Russia, Eurasia and the Middle East, perhaps making it a wash emissions-wise. He said the Canadian gas could actually be worse from an emissions standpoint, depending on how the competing supply moves. LNG is more energy intensive than pipeline shipment because the gas needs to be liquefied and moved on a ship. In China, every type of energy is in demand. So instead of displacing coal, LNG would likely just be added to the mix, Fellows added. 'Anyone who's thinking about this as one or the other is thinking about it wrong,' Fellows said. A senior analyst with Investors for Paris Compliance, which aims to hold Canadian publicly traded companies to their net-zero promises, said he doubts a country like India would see the economic case for replacing domestically produced coal with imported Canadian gas. 'Even at the lowest price of gas, it's still multiple times the price,' said Michael Sambasivam. 'You'd need some massive system to provide subsidies to developing countries to be replacing their coal with a fuel that isn't even really proven to be much greener.' And even in that case, 'it's not as if they can just flip a switch and take it in,' he added. 'There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to take in LNG as well as to use it. You have to build import terminals. You have to refit your power terminals.' What LNG would be competing head-to-head with, Sambasivam said, is renewable energy. If there were any emissions reductions abroad as a result of the coal-to-gas switch, Sambasivam said he doesn't see why a Canadian company should get the credit. 'Both parties are going to want to claim the emissions savings and you can't claim those double savings,' he said. There's also a 'jarring' double-standard at play, he said, as industry players have long railed against environmental reviews that factor in emissions from the production and combustion of the oil and gas a pipeline carries, saying only the negligible emissions from running the infrastructure itself should be considered. Devyani Singh, an investigative researcher at who ran for the Greens in last year's B.C. election, said arguments that LNG is a green fuel are undermined by the climate impacts of producing, liquefying and shipping it. A major component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Methane that leaks from tanks, pipelines and wells has been a major issue that industry, government and environmental groups have been working to tackle. 'Have we actually accounted for all the leakage along the whole pipeline? Have we accounted for the actual under-reporting of methane emissions happening in B.C. and Canada?' asked Singh. Even if LNG does have an edge over coal, thinking about it as a 'transition' or 'bridge' fuel at this juncture is a problem, she said. 'The time for transition fuels is over,' she said. 'Let's just be honest — we are in a climate crisis where the time for transition fuels was over a decade ago.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2025.
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: Why Chicago has a restaurant crisis
The hit TV show 'The Bear' chronicles an independent restaurant's existential struggles and celebrates Chicagoans' determination to survive. But you need only traverse one of the city's real-life arteries, such as North Broadway through Edgewater or along 26th Street in Little Village, to see the the state of one of Chicago's most celebrated and artful industries: shuttered restaurants pockmark almost every block. Chicago's storied restaurant business is mired in crisis. If you doubt our word that this is a dire emergency, we suggest you swivel your head from road or sidewalk and look for yourselves. Fine dining. Trattorias. Taquerias. Vietnamese cuisine. Italian beef. It seems not to matter. Chicago has never been a locus of chain restaurants, unlike many cities in the south. The fame of the city's restaurants has sprouted from the creativity of independent operators, some craving (and winning) James Beard Awards and international acclaim, and others merely wanting to serve and nourish their communities. We hardly need to tell you that many locally owned restaurants are the foci of their neighborhoods, which accounts for why there was such a howl of anguish in recent days when the cozy Gale Street Inn on Milwaukee Avenue in Jefferson Park announced its closure. Its famously genial operator, George Karzas, had owned and run the restaurant since 1994. Among his many other good works, he supported his local Jefferson Park theater, The Gift, storefront theaters and storefront restaurants sharing much of the same homegrown DNA in this city. At the Gale Street Inn, you always knew you were in Chicago. The problem? The current headwinds are many in the restaurant business, including the well-documented rise in food costs. But top of mind of those in the hospitality industry in Chicago is the high cost of labor and the city's shortsighted decision to get rid of the so-called tipped minimum wage following a campaign by an out-of-state activist group, One Fair Wage, which had worked its agenda on Mayor Brandon Johnson and enough of the aldermen in the City Council. Karzas' decision to close the Gale Street Inn comes as the tipped minimum wage was set to increase again Tuesday, rising from $11.02 to $12.62 an hour as part of a phased-in approach that has been a progressive nightmare for restaurants. One Fair Wage is led by Saru Jayaraman, a Yale University-educated lawyer, activist and academic who runs the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Back in Chicago, Christina Gonzalez from Taqueria Los Comales told us this past week that she worries not about political campaigns, but the price of her burritos at a family business with a 50-year history. 'I can't charge $24 for a burrito,' she told us. 'My customers won't come.' Gonzalez thus defined the Catch-22. While fine-dining establishments that attract the wealthiest customers can raise (and have raised) their menu prices to eye-popping levels, restaurants that appeal to ordinary Chicagoans know that they have already hit the ceiling of what their customers can afford to pay. Their only option often is to close. 'You raise prices, you lose customers,' Sam Toia, head of the Illinois Restaurant Association told us. And that is exactly what has been happening, Gonzalez said. Counter service is looking to her like the only way to go, which means laying off servers and defeating what the rise in the tipped minimum wage sought to achieve. Anyone who attended the National Restaurant Show in Chicago last month was smacked in the face at booth after booth by a single agenda wrought from desperation: how to harness technology to find ways to use fewer human workers. But while fast-food joints can and will have a robot flipping burgers, independent, table-service restaurants are all about human interaction. We think there is a preponderance of evidence that the end of the tipped minimum wage, which Johnson has consistently defended using racially charged language, is a major cause of the current crisis. Even some servers agree, because their hours are being cut and they're being cross-trained to juggle multiple roles as owners try to cut costs. They can see that their workplaces are on the cusp of going out of business. 'None of us want this,' said Jose Garcia, a veteran server at The Dearborn in Chicago's Loop. In Massachusetts, hardly a conservative state, a ballot initiative that would have eliminated the tipped minimum wage was defeated by voters last fall by a margin of roughly 2-to-1 after the state's Democratic governor, Maura Healey, came out against the proposal, saying she was convinced it would lead to the closing of restaurants. The arguments for the drastic rise in labor costs hardly make sense because it forms only a relatively small portion of servers' actual income. Hard as it may be for some in City Council to understand, the health of their restaurants matters more to most servers than the size of their base paycheck, because the bulk of their income comes from tips. Most servers of our acquaintance have no interest in being paid a flat hourly wage that discourages tipping; they know that will hurt their earnings. What they most want is to be working in a dynamic restaurant where they can offer excellent service so that the tips flow. It long has been state law that in the event tipped employees such as servers and bartenders do not at least make the prevailing minimum wage, their employers must make up the difference. Few need to do so but still, most do. And, even in the case of the few bad actors, fairness demands that the law be more strictly enforced, rather than forcing all restaurants to increase their wage bills. Toia told us his group would support the prosecution of those who do not do right by their workers. It's axiomatic in the restaurant business that servers make better money than those in the so-called back of the house. Korina Sanchez, vice president and general counsel at Third Coast Hospitality, told us that information from point-of-sale systems tells her that her servers typically make $40 an hour (good, this is hard work). Elsewhere, Toia said, it can be far more. Restaurants generally now know what their servers are making because cash tips have become rare. The change in the law is causing yet harsher inequity with non-tipped employees. Before these changes, servers were making significantly more than line cooks and dishwashers, who are more likely to be immigrants shouldering the support of a family. If Congress passes Donald Trump's tax-and-spending bill, which contains new tax breaks for tipped workers, that will tip the balance (no pun intended) even further in servers' favor. Sanchez said that one of the saddest aspects of the crisis is that it is preventing her from doing more for her kitchen workers. So what to do? Simply put, City Council should stop this craziness before we lose any more restaurants. Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, D.C., proposed last month to repeal Initiative 82 — the three-year-old law that eliminates D.C.'s tipped minimum wage. She knows it did not work. 'We think our restaurants are facing a perfect storm with increased operational and supply costs, higher rent, and unique labor challenges,' she said, arguing that it was part of her job to 'ensure our restaurants can compete, survive, grow and employ D.C. residents,' Axios reported. Amen. Meanwhile in Chicago, Mayor Johnson has made no such statements, insisting that the city will push ahead with its increases. His mouthpieces on City Council have been arguing that the sector is doing just great. This is nonsense. Only restaurants funded by chains and private equity groups are growing in Chicago. For independents, it's an existential crisis. At a bare minimum, City Council should stop the increase in the tipped minimum wage and leave it at its current rate, $11.02 an hour. Most likely, it would need to take this action with a two-thirds majority, so as to prevent a veto, given that the pleas from Chicago restaurants so far have fallen on unreceptive mayoral ears. There is an ordinance waiting in committee, as proposed by Ald. Bennett Lawson, 44th, that would repeal this entire misguided mishegoss. Ideally, City Council would listen to fellow Democratic leaders in Washington and Boston and admit this did not work. When pressed by us, Toia said that the Illinois Restaurant Association, which he described as 'progressive and pragmatic,' could live with a pause rather than a repeal. It is the least City Council should do to save Chicago's restaurants.
