Good Times to turn salaried managers into hourlies

good times breakfast tray

The Good Times quick-service burger chain will recast its salaried restaurant positions as hourly jobs this fall to temper the impact of new federal overtime regulations, CEO Boyd Hoback revealed yesterday.

“Even though some of our management are well above the new Department of Labor requirement for an exempt employee, we anticipate a very small increase in our overall labor as a result of that,” Hoback told financial analysts.

He indicated that the approach will allow Good Times to keep unit management personnel on a 48-hour work week with only a 0.25-point increase in labor costs, even with an anticipated jump in Colorado’s minimum wage.

Good Times’ sister brand, the full-service Bad Daddy’s chain, will stick with salaried managers, Hoback noted. Virtually all of those individuals are already earning more than the DOL’s new threshold for exemption from overtime pay, $47,476 on an annual basis. The new level, which is more than double the current trigger of $23,660, takes effect in December.

The 37-unit burger chain is the first operation of any scale to reveal its strategy for dealing with the new overtime rules, which were proposed by the Obama administration as a way of raising the income of an estimated 5 million people. Many restaurateurs have acknowledged they’re still modeling ways of minimizing the impact of the change.

Bad Daddy’s is the company’s new growth vehicle. It currently consists of 18 company-operated and licensed stores.

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