I & I Editorial BoardFlorida Pizza Kitchen. It doesn’t have quite the ring to it that California Pizza Kitchen does. But had the iconic chain been dreamed up in the 2020s rather than the 1980s, it would have been FPK rather than CPK, not because the California Pizza Kitchen’s co-founders moved to Florida, though one did a couple of years ago, but due to the Golden State’s corrosive business policies.
Not that long ago, California was “the greatest place to do business,” Rick Rosenfield, the CPK co-founder who fled to the Sunshine State, told Fox News Digital.
“If it were me today, I would open in Florida before I would open it in California,” Rosenfield said. “California is less business-friendly today, and they make it apparent.”
Rosenfield and Larry Flax started CPK in Beverly Hills in 1985, before the state became a tax-regulate-and-degree nightmare for businesses. Today the state is more well known for the steady flight of companies, capital and vital human resources, all seeking liberalized markets where entrepreneurship, innovation and hard work are rewarded rather than punished.
That describes Florida, which Rosenfield says is “quite friendly,” and relative to California and the rest of the blue states, an oasis where “there’s less bureaucracy.”
California is actively hostile to business. Rosenfield told Fox that the business climate sharply changed after COVID, which is true, but it didn’t begin there. Not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of businesses have quit on the state and relocated either fully or partially elsewhere since 2008. The list of high-profile and California legacy companies that have fled, according to a Pacific Research Institute report, includes “Hewlett-Packard, whose founding is recognized as the birth of Silicon Valley; entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX; Charles Schwab, founded in San Francisco in 1971; Mitsubishi; Nissan North America; Toyota Motor North America; Oracle; Palantir Technologies; and Jacobs Engineering.”
Trying to do business in California means being tangled in red tape, choked by regulation and taxes, smothered with various fees, and bogged down by crumbling infrastructure.
It was not last week but more than a decade ago when Steve Sather, then El Pollo Loco’s chief executive, said he would not start a business in California because there’s too much bureaucracy. It’s “too hard to get things done,” he said, taxes are too heavy, and it’s “hard to get people to move into California.”
“There is a big barrier for entry for new concepts coming into California,” Sather said, and “hard to get locations” in an environment in which permitting is a slog.
Meanwhile, businesses are thriving in states, particularly Florida, where taxes are low and regulation is light, which means workers and their families are benefiting, not losing their jobs because activist legislators hiked the minimum wage far beyond manageable levels or ran their employers out of the state because they’re wedded to a progressive agenda that abuses businesses.
The question is old, but it still needs to be asked: When is California going to turn things around? The answer is unknowable, but now would be a good time to start, because the bottom is closer than ever and coming up fast.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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