A victory for California consumers and producers in search of artisanal tippling. [San Francisco Chronicle, last year]
Posts Tagged ‘small business’
Artisanal ice cream OK in Illinois
At least so long as it’s produced in an industrial manner. [Chicago Tribune]
Get ready to surprise yourself with a drug test
In my new post at Cato at Liberty, I quote a few highlights from Philip Greenspun’s account of his encounter with Federal Aviation Administration regulators intent on applying to the smallest aviation businesses the same rules that govern the largest. Per George Wallace, “All regulation aspires to the condition of a Monty Python sketch.”
Bungling nanny trashes 100,000 cribs
Around the country today, CPSC regulations are forcing retailers to throw out new, unused baby cribs — estimates of the number range higher than 100,000 — that the federal government itself considers safe enough to be used in day cares. I explain the latest Nanny State snafu in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
More: Quin Hillyer, CFIF; Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason. And CPSC commissioner Anne Northup corrects a misimpression in some parts of the press:
The new standards ban drop-side cribs. But the standards also prohibit the sale, new or used, of all cribs – both drop-side and fixed-side – that are not tested to the new standards by a private laboratory. Because very few cribs that were not originally manufactured to the new standards will ever be tested, the new standards essentially ban all such cribs – drop-side and fixed side. As reported in today’s press, millions of drop-side cribs have been recalled. On the other hand, tens of millions of fixed side cribs manufactured to previous standards have never been recalled, never been found to be unsafe, and now also cannot be sold new or resold used.
“So You Got My Letter”
Patrick at Popehat has compiled “A Small Businessman’s Guide To Dealing With Obnoxious Letters From Lawyers.”
The publicity squeeze
After taking heat in the press, Montgomery County, Md. has waived a $500 fine levied against a kids’ lemonade stand [WUSA, Daily Caller]
Liquor store licensing rules
They could drive you to drink — especially if you’re not politically well-connected [Coyote]
California closes a yogurt business
No wonder it had to go:
Her business, while it lasted, consisted of herself, making yogurt on the instructions of her father. Ms Dashtaki was renting space in the kitchen of an Egyptian restaurant where she and her father, “like elves before and after their working hours”, lovingly cultured their yogurt under a blanket, then drained it through a certain kind of cheese cloth, then stirred it for hours, and so forth. For the taste to be divine, everything has to be just so. And, being artisans, they kept the volume tiny, about 20 gallons (76 litres) a week, for sale only at local farmers’ markets.
Homa Dashtaki was eager to demonstrate that her yogurt was safe and healthful, but complying with California regulations turned out to be not so easy. In fact, authorities told her that she would face possible prosecution unless she established a “Grade A dairy facility” employing processes more commonly found in factories. A highlight: she’d have to install a pasteurizer even though she made her yogurt from milk that was already pasteurized. What’s more, California law makes it illegal to pasteurize milk twice, so there went any hope of continuing her straightforward way of obtaining milk, namely bringing it home from a fancy grocery store.
Ms Dashtaki is pondering whether to move to another state, one whose rules allow for artisanal products. She would not be the first entrepreneur to flee the Golden State.
Although a small artisan cheese sector struggles to get by, the California dairy market generally is dominated by mass-market producers selling blandly standardized wares. And you can see how that winds up happening. [The Economist]
More: Coyote. And more on the California regulatory climate from Ted at PoL, including a link to Cal-Peculiarities (PDF), by David Kadue of Seyfarth Shaw, on the state’s distinctively onerous employment laws.
Economics of patent trolling
Rob Beschizza sees clues to the economics of patent litigation in the public pronouncements of Lodsys, a company that has sued small Apple developers based on IP claims covering such common app features as upgrade buttons. [BoingBoing, more, This Is My Next (with copy of a 2007 patent for “Methods and Systems for Gathering Information from Units of a Commodity Across a Network”] Update: Apple intervenes.
Big Food regulatory net
It’s not hard for a small chicken farmer to get caught in it, as we find in this Jesse Walker account. The food safety bill passed last year similarly carves out a little exemption for small producers who sell directly to consumers at farmer’s markets and the like, while not exempting those who sell through intermediaries — even though the intermediary in such a case may be simply a neighboring farmer who is headed in to the city market.
Related: India’s ingenious dabbawallah lunch-distribution system, which could probably never get past health codes in this country [37 Signals via Market Urbanism]