Recent Comments

Shame shame shame on you Ellen! Just greed and narcissism and absolute ridiculousness to keep flipping houses in Montecito. Why don’t you go and do something beneficial and good for this world, with your hundreds of millions of dollars? karma will get you in the end!

Not sure what the solution is. Most "compostable" containers are rife with PFAS and despite recent legislation in CA that food containers not utilize PFAS, I'm extremely dubious that they've been effectively phased out. No good options that I'm aware of, which is very unfortunate.

14 E Carrillo street

After going on a tour, I quickly realized that the foundation is in need of donors and funding, which helped me understand why these paid events keep happening to help fund the upkeep on the grounds and property (and on a tour you are told what those donations have contributed to). To call is a private club is a big stretch — I find it no different than how Lotusland or Casa de Herrero operate — except the public has a misperception that the city owns this (they don't) and that the public should freely walk about it, which makes absolutely no sense after you go on a tour.

It's sad to see Bellosguardo has pretty much been turned into a private club for the wealthy. The website says "Building a future where the estate can be enjoyed by all as a focal point for the arts" but the "by all" part should be replaced with "those that can afford it". This foundation is a joke.

can anyone go up to the rooftop deck at the marriott? If you buy beverages?

The tarantula walk sounded interesting to me, too! I love those fuzzy guys (and gals.)

Thank you for the suggestion, where I can buy the bread at?

Jenna is a very busy person. She doesn't have time for such pedestrian tasks.

I've been to Convivo twice in the last few months and was surprised and delighted -- both times it felt like we were surrounded by out-of-towners. It's on kind of a lonely corner -- Milpas and Cabrillo -- so they don't get the foot traffic of State of the Funk Zone. But you can valet your car and the staff is super friendly.

You fail to mention the fact that you can choose not to accept credit cards. If you can't maintain a profit where other businesses can, maybe the problem isn't the credit cards.

Here's the scoop. It's simple. Credit cards are assumed debt by a customer. For a business to use credit cards, the credit card processor charges the business an average of 2.5% to 3.5% of the transaction amount as a fee to the business owner. This is how the credit card processors make their money, they skim off the top of the transaction. So for a $100 bill, the restaurant gets charged lets say 3.5% which is the local average, so that's $3.50, while the full $100 charge for your meal goes on your credit card. Now you basically just assumed debt to eat. If you paid the restaurant in cash, they get the full $100, instead they got $96.50 because you decided to pay with debt. The processing company charges the restaurant the $3.50 for using their processing service. Several years ago the state passed a law allowing the fee getting charged to the business to be passed onto the customer. The restaurant legally has to disclose to the customer either on the door or on their menu that this percentage is to be charged for credit card transactions. As of recently the restaurants started adding the fee into the bill, the customer pays the original $100, plus the $3.50 for a total of $103.50 , so the restaurant doesn't get charged the processing fee expense. Now here's where it gets interesting. Inflation has sky rocketed and most restaurants on average make 3% to 5% profit in a year after all of their costs. Food costs have skyrocketed and employee costs have skyrocketed, out of control of the restaurant (thank our evil state leader Newsom for that one) . This leaves the restaurant with higher operating costs and lower profits, basically they're getting hammered at both ends. They have 3 options, close their doors, raise all of their food prices or pass the credit card processing fees onto the customers and keep food prices the same. Most have chosen option C, to charge the credit card paying customer a small fee and erase this cost to the restaurant. If a restaurant is making $100,000 a month in revenues, they're making 3k to 5k in profit a month off of that. If they pass the monthly credit card fees of 3.5%, that's $3,500 they just offset their rising bottom line expenses buy $3500 a month. This is why you are seeing these fees. The restaurants are scraping for places to cut costs and putting that processing fee back on the customers who pay with credit cards. I am a business owner and I ask the question, why should I have to pay for your debt. I can pass the fee onto you and you pay $3.50, or extrapolate that fee over all the credit card transactions in a year in this example of $1,200,0000 and that's $42,000 in fees. Thats a huge cost savings for a business that has such small margins. So if you like your local restaurants I would stop complaining about the fees and eat them or the establishments that you've come to like eating at are going to be gone or all computer automated sooner then later. If they can't charge the fees they're going to lay off staff and you're going to order your own food from a digital kiosk like Chili's in Goleta, basically service will evaporate as you've come to know it. In fact all businesses state wide have the ability per the recent change in law to include this fee back into the final sale price, but not all do. Like they say cash is king, pay with cash and save your money, pay with debt and assume more debt, you decide, but those are your options.