Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily midday digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.
Free Market Weeds Out Unwanted Business
Bad news for fans of mechanical bull-riding and public intoxication: Wild Greg’s has closed.
“For 2 and a half years we have fought through endless mandates and lockdowns issued by Governor Tim Walz, as well as riots and unchecked crime,” owner Greg Urban writes, on Wild Greg’s letterhead, in a press release posted Tuesday to Facebook. “We made the tough decision that the road to a prosperous Minneapolis longer than we hoped and that closing this location was in our best interest.”
(Urban joins fellow disgruntled Minneapolis restaurateur Rob Dubnecay, the owner of Chicago’s Taste Authority who fumed on Monday via our town's "third-rate, off-brand Breitbart" news site.)
Wild Greg’s has had a complicated relationship with downtown Minneapolis; the bar was part of a group of downtown restaurants that sued the city over vax mandates, and Urban went as far as to ban “Dictator Walz” from his establishment. (We emailed Urban asking if the ban remained enforced until the end, but didn't hear back.) Before making the closing announcement, Urban went on Fox News in a segment titled “Blue city biz owners struggle to make comeback” to shit on Minneapolis.
“Minneapolis is not the place to be right now, unfortunately,” he said, as footage of violent crime in NYC plays on the screen. “It's slow. People are scared to come out of the suburbs and go downtown… The restaurants out in the suburbs are packed, but downtown is a ghost town.”
Fortunately other restaurants in the area, including Cowboy Jack’s, the Loon Cafe, and Pizza Luce, are still serving folks in the area. Urban does dig Florida, however, where he has two Wild Greg’s, including one in spring break tourist trap Pensacola.
“Florida never really closed,” says the man who moonlights as a Vadnais Heights city councilmember. “And the whole country basically flocked to Florida. Not just for the beautiful beaches, but for the great business climate.”
AT&T Is Forcing 500+ MN Workers Back Into the Office
The worst people on earth are dead set about one thing: Workers must be herded back into the office, where they will be monitored with increased managerial ease/punitiveness. (Although some companies aren’t letting geographic boundaries stop them; see blurb No. 3.) In a survey, over half of AT&T’s call center workers claim they’d leave the company if work-from-home privileges are rescinded, according to Kieran F. Knutson with CWA 7250. More than 7,000 of ‘em recently signed a petition asking the company to make WFH a permanent option. But that’s not stopping AT&T from ordering all those workers back inside the office by this fall, including around 500 in downtown Minneapolis and Bloomington. CWA Local 7250, which represents about half of those local workers, staged a protest Tuesday outside of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation. The workers who attended likely echoed Sara Fry, a Minnesota-based AT&T employee who’s dreading her return to the office. "I'm like a lot of folks and there's a panic setting in," she told CBS News last week. "Some people have actually said they're literally weeping every day, thinking about how they have to change up their day." What does the Dallas-headquartered telecom giant in question have to say about all this? We don't care! Don't corral workers like cattle in a feedlot when they can easily place calls from home.
Ellison: “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” Are a Scam
OK, he didn’t actually say “scam,” probably for some “legal” “reasons,” but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison did issue a consumer alert regarding the state's 90 (NINETY!) “crisis pregnancy centers” today. “As Minnesota’s chief consumer advocate and legal officer, I want to alert Minnesotans that crisis pregnancy centers often do not offer the services they claim to offer, and that the information about abortion and contraception they offer may be inaccurate or misleading,” Ellison said in a press release. Feel free to edit out the “often” and “may be” in your mind. As Racket detailed here, “crisis pregnancy centers”—fake abortion clinics—lure in pregnant women, lie to them about their options, and either pressure them into continuing their pregnancies or unnecessarily delay abortions. The real fun part is that we help pay for them through the "Positive Abortion Alternatives" (barf) program, which doles out state funds to institutions that discourage abortion. Our 8 (EIGHT!) abortion clinics, needless to say, benefit from no such program. Just another reminder that there’s a whole lot of shit forced birthers can do to interfere with abortion rights besides an outright ban.
Ann Kim Will Appear on Netflix's Chef's Table: Pizza
Chef's Table—that overwrought, orgiastic and, we'll admit it, damned delightful Netflix food series—is turning its macro lenses on a new subject: pizza. And one of the featured chefs is none other than Ann Kim, she of Young Joni, Hello Pizza, and Pizzeria Lola, fame. Kim shared the news on Instagram yesterday; Chef's Table: Pizza premiers September 7. Even if you've never watched the show since it premiered in 2015, you might be familiar with the style. The lush cinematography and dramatic string score has been expertly spoofed by Portlandia, Cracked, and many others. Its first few seasons took the film crew inside some of the most celebrated and exclusive kitchens around the world before turning to more egalitarian fare: BBQ in 2020, and now, pizza.
