California Pizza Kitchen is a well-known restaurant that has helped spread the Golden State’s dining culture to places across the country for several decades. However, 40 years after it launched, the co-founder of the chain said that if he had to start over, he probably wouldn’t pick California, noting it has become hostile toward entrepreneurs.
“If it were me today, I would open in Florida before I would open it in California,” California Pizza Kitchen co-founder Rick Rosenfield said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “I think it has a lot going for it. The difference is [it’s] very business friendly and California is less business friendly today, and they make it apparent.”
Rosenfield then stated that when he and California Pizza Kitchen co-founder Larry Flax started the business, the environment in California was “really good.” He said that several decades ago, he would have referred to California as “the greatest place to do business.” He added, “We have 365 days a year of great weather. We have a great labor base, great demographics, great densities.”
“And people would say, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ I would say, ‘A snowstorm in the winter on a weekend for the malls,’ right? That’s not true today,” Rosenfield told the outlet. To punctuate Rosenfield’s point, several big corporations, such as Chevron, Oracle, and Tesla, have decided to flee from the Golden State, moving their headquarters to states that are more friendly and conducive for their businesses.
Rosenfield attributes the drastic transformation of California’s business climate to the COVID-19 pandemic, citing labor shortages, increased regulation, and a spike in costs, including a ridiculously high minimum wage. Thanks to a law that went into effect in April 2024, all fast-food employees in California had to be paid at least $20.00.
When businesses are forced to pay higher costs to do business, like a hike in taxes, those costs are often passed on to customers through higher prices for goods and services. “The mantra is, well, ‘We’re going to tax businesses.’ ‘We’re going make the businesses pay more.’ But it isn’t just the businesses that pay more, it’s a customer that pays more. Because what happens, you raise costs, you raise minimum wage, businesses have to respond to that,” Rosenfield explained.
Due to the myriad of challenges businesses face in California and the friendliness of Florida — Rosenfield moved to the Sunshine State two years ago — more and more businesses are looking toward the latter as a replacement for the stifling economic conditions of the West Coast. “Florida is quite friendly. There’s less bureaucracy in Florida and there’s more bureaucracy [in] California, and that’s basically my experience,” Rosenfield went on to tell Fox News Digital.
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When California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked to respond to Rosenfield’s comments about Florida and the business environment in California, his office responded, “”Florida Pizza Kitchen doesn’t have the same ring to it. We are proud that they are headquartered here and that nearly half of all their restaurants nationwide are in California.”
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has called out Newsom’s anti-business policies too: