From John Stossel at Fox Business:

For 15 years, the B & B Do it Center, a local hardware store in the small California town of Camarillo, has been putting out coffee and doughnuts for its morning customers. Actually longer, says owner Randy Collins; the previous owner did it too. Customers liked the courtesy, but… well, you know where this is going.

An anonymous customer complaint to the county brought health inspectors to the store, who determined its tradition of more than 15 years of offering coffee and doughnuts to customers violated food-handling regulations…

Inspectors told Collins that unless he was willing to install stainless-steel sinks with hot and cold water and have a prep kitchen to handle the food, he was violating the law.

As California government has solved all of its other problems, it seems appropriate to regulate coffee and doughnuts. The county bureaucrat, apparently with a straight face, described what Collins must do before he can offer the doughnuts to his customers:

“What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” said Huff. “Those establishments have permits.”

It’s amazing that they still allow people to have children without permits.

Indeed. The maddening stupidity of the California government attempting to regulate a business providing free stuff to its customers in the face of financial proof that California is thoroughly and completely incompetent to govern on any level should make its citizens angrier than hornets.

When your government is broke, you should govern less – not that there are any circumstances by which a business should have to ask permission of some bureaucratic commissar in order to have coffee and doughnuts for its customers.