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This past weekend, August 1-2 2009, was Market Days here in Chicago.  For those unfamiliar, Market Days is a giant street festival that takes up all of Boystown.  The street is closed from Belmont to Addison, and all along the sidewalks booths are set up selling food or drink, various tee shirts and crafts, or offering information of various kinds regarding social services, political candidates, products from T-Mobile, etc. It’s billed as the largest LGBTQ street festival in the Midwest, and attracts over 300,000 people, easily, each of the festival’s two days. 

The Chicago Diner is a vegetarian restaurant located at Roscoe and Halsted, smack in the middle of Boystown (3411 N. Halsted, Chicago IL 60613  (773) 935-6696  feedback@veggiediner.com or chef@veggiediner.com).  

It’s been around since 1983 and has raw, vegan “cheesecake” and vegan “milkshakes” that are, in all honesty, pretty darn good (and that’s coming from committed non-vegetarians).  The staff who work there are as liberal as you can possibly be, resplendent with piercings and vibrant rainbow hair colors. The whole establishment seems more at home in Seattle than Chicago (like it was shrunk, Kandor-style, dropped into a patchouli pouch, and then embiggened halfway across the country in its new home in Boystown, sandwiched between an auto glass repair shop and a 711). Customers have Caucasian dreadlocks, own more tie-dye than roadies for The Dead, and cover every inch of themselves in O-bot paraphernalia whenever possible.  It’s a surreal experience to eat there — if the staff detects even the slightest glimpse of conservatism, their friendliness drops immediately.  There’s always a definite “Us” vs. “Them” vibe at this place, intended or not, which might just be the nature of a vegetarian establishment in a meat and potatoes city like Chicago, as not only politically, but also in terms dietary, they find themselves fighting ideological battles that never end. Plus, without eating meat, they probably get exhausted and crabby more easily. 

So, we’re not surprised by what The Chicago Diner did at the 2009 Market Days.  Not in the least.  We are intrigued, however, by the thought that they might not, in the end, be able to get away with it legally.

At Market Days, there were about 20 food/beverage vendors lining the street with prominently displayed TIPS jars at their cash registers.  Bars such as Sidetrack, MiniBar, Cocktail, Lucky Horseshoe, FireFly, Spin, and others all had TIPS jars clearly labeled as such – with the clear direction that anything a customer left in the jar was a tip for the staff of the booth.  Other food vendors like the Italian Sandwich Booth, the Polish Food Booth, the Chinese Food Booth, etc. also had these TIPS jars out.  Here are a few examples of them:

P8020103This was the booth for FireFly, with TIPS clearly labeled on the jar. 

P8020101Here’s the Italian Sandwich Booth, with the TIPS lettered in red on the mayo jar in front of the cash register. 

P8020102Here’s Cocktail’s booth, with the big white box just behind the star that has TIPS written in black marker. 

We have about 20 shots like this, of every TIPS jar we could spot.  Without fail, all of the booths clearly labeled these kinds of jars as TIPS…except The Chicago Diner, which instead put out jars that made it appear they were collecting money for the “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund”:

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So, all of the other booths had TIPS jars, but The Chicago Diner has jars that appear to be collecting for a “Retirement Fund” for Sarah Palin. There is no disclaimer anywhere saying this is some kind of joke.  There were 6-8 of these jars spread out across the massive booth Chicago Diner had at Market Days, so it’s not like it was an isolated practical joke by an errant staffer.  These were all printed out by Chicago Diner management and prominently displayed on their booth to collect as much as possible from customers. 

What are the rules governing a business collecting donations ostensibly for a “Fund” of any kind?  All around Chicago, there are little coin drop games, bubblegum machines, and other collection boxes at restaurants, drug stores, health clubs, etc., but those all have very clear indications of where the “Fund” dollars are going.  

“TIPS” is one thing — a customer knows what “TIPS” means.  It’s a tip for the staff serving you food. 

But what is a “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund”? 

We spoke to the manager-on-duty for Chicago Diner on Sunday August 2nd.  She refused to give her name, but here are several shots of her, angry after we confronted her about the “Retirement Fund” jars:

P8020081She’s the one in the pink wig, telling a staffer we complained about the jars.

P8020086Here she is again, doing her level best to not give us a clear shot of her.  For about 15 minutes, she actually kept her head down so that we couldn’t take a clear pic of her face.  

P8020089If there’s nothing wrong with having “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund” collection jars at your for-profit, non-charity, non-501c3 business, then why do you need to hide from a camera?

P8020087You can’t really be sure, but the woman under the wig might be one of the owners of The Chicago Diner.  If you can imagine her without the pink wig, she might be the brown-haired chef in the pic below.  MAYBE she’s the blond, but she looks a little more like the brunette. She sure as heck isn’t Jem from the Holograms (no matter how much she wants to be). 

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We confronted the manager about the “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund” jars and asked her if the money collected was going to be donated to SarahPAC to fund Sarah Palin’s retirement from office as Governor, as the jars state and as we could reasonably imply since a fund named by The Chicago Diner in the fashion they chose to name it would sure seem to indicate as such.

“No, of course not. That’s for us,” she said. 

“So, are you a 501(c)3 authorized to ask for donations to a “Fund” of any kind.  If so, what’s your 501(c)3 number?”

“Look, for the last 5 years we ran a Bush Impeachment Fund and no one complained.  People here hate Palin and we’ve gotten lots of compliments on those jars.  People take their pictures with them and everything.  So this is the first negative thing I’ve heard.”

“You didn’t answer the question.  Do you see the difference between asking for TIPS like the other booths and asking for donations for what is a fictitious “Fund” you are running using Sarah Palin, a private citizen’s, good name?”

“I don’t have time for this. It’s a joke that everyone thinks is funny because Palin is a joke.”

“You should at the very least put a disclaimer up that this is a joke and that this is in fact a TIP jar, like the TIPS jars every other food/drink booth has. Because it sure looks like you are collecting money to hand over to SarahPAC at the end of the weekend and there looks like there could be a couple thousand dollars to give to Sarah Palin when Market Days is done.”

“We’d make less money if I did that, so the signs are going to stay up the way they are.  I’m not giving a cent to Palin.”

She stormed off at that point, but she was clearly shaken by the questions regarding charitable fraud.  This is, after all, a for-profit business — one that had jars out soliciting donations for what it claimed was a charitable fund.  

Let’s take Sarah Palin out of the equation for a second.  

What if The Chicago Diner had “Jerry’s Kids Fund” or “NAACP College Fund” or “Children’s Burn Unit Victims’ Fund” written on their jars instead of “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund”?  

It’s Market Days, a great big LGBTQ party, so any charity outside the HIV/AIDS spectrum isn’t typically seen soliciting donations from this particular crowd.  So Jerry’s Kids, the NAACP, and burn victims would be as out of place for “Fund” donations as the Sarah Palin bit seems.  

What kind of hue and cry would come down upon The Chicago Diner if it had jars out asking for donations to a “Jerry’s Kids Fund”, when it was later learned The Chicago Diner kept all those donations for themselves?  The MSM would be all over that, like pink on a bad wig.

There was nothing posted anywhere to clue someone into the fact that those tip jars were not really going to a retirement fund for Governor Palin.  In fact, when asked specifically whether that money would go to Palin, the Chicago Diner staffers working the booth just smiled blankly and said nothing.  Like this staffer:

P8020083Specifically asked if the money was going to Palin, the young lady just giggled, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Dunno”.

So, there’s no disclaimer telling people this is a joke trading off a private citizen to make money for a for-profit business.  Staffers don’t admit this is a joke and say “dunno” when directly asked about it. And it’s not something The Chicago Diner would have done with Jerry’s Kids, the NAACP, burn victims, etc. 

For anyone versed in 501(c)3 compliance and charitable regulations, we wonder if there’s a complaint that can be made against The Chicago Diner’s business license for this — particularly since when alerted to the problem with these jars, and confronted about the ambiguity of their “joke”, they purposefully chose to not take down the signs or alter them with a disclaimer noting these were in reality TIPS jars like tall the others, just ones that purported to be contribution jars for Sarah Palin and her retirement. 

Liberals are terrified of Palin.  

You will never see a Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rob Portman, or Haley Barbour “Retirement Fund” anywhere.  Liberals were terrifed of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, too, because both men won two terms (and The Chicago Diner admits it used Bush to fuel their “Impeachment Fund” for 5 years straight). The “Bush Impeachment Fund” has a different vibe to it, as clearly someone couldn’t think that money was supposed to go to Bush, as he was never impeached.  

But, Sarah Palin did retire as Governor…so a Fund collecting for her is not an alien concept.  Pro-Sarah sites are doing just that continuously to build up SarahPAC’s war chest so The Guv can travel the country and make her presence known. 

Liberals fall apart when pushed back, especially in a place like Chicago where they’re not used to that.  The woman in pink from The Chicago Diner was genuinely stunned when we confronted her. If she gets enough emails and calls about these “Sarah Palin Retirement Fund” jars asking if the money is really going to SarahPAC or not, it might make her think twice about pulling stunts like this again.  

If things like this are going on in your neighborhood, you should call the Liberals out on it too.  In cities like Chicago, that are Liberal dominated, the reason they get away with so much is that no one dares challenge them. 

Well, how about we challenge The Chicago Diner on this, and what they do going forward, and see what happens?

CONTACT:

The Chicago Diner

3411 N. Halsted, Chicago IL 60613

(773) 935-6696

feedback@veggiediner.com

UPDATE #1