re: #185 karmic_inquisitor

Without getting into details, I recently took over a couple of restaurants.

They were losing money and I studied where they were and how they were run and knew the landlords. So I got the businesses for a song (they were about to close, so I saved them the costs of closing).

In the course of the last 3 months I have turned both locations around and they are at break even (they’d be making money but I spend all of he profits on advertising and enhancing the buildings / kitchens).

Well fundamental to that all happening was fixing the scheduling of labor. We had to reduce the labor costs and we did it by looking at the hourly flow of customers for the last year in each location and coming up with some simulations where we learned when servers needed to come to work, when busboys needed to arrive, etc. We also put in an inventory control system that I wrote (and which managed to catch a manager who was stealing - fired him).

So in the course of this effort, 68 jobs were saved (although some people got replaced for stealing / incompetence). So how do the remaining employees feel about things? They think I suck. They think I am an ass hole for reducing their hours and for firing some nice people. never mind that the air conditioning in the kitchens now work and that customers are starting to return. Never mind that the tips are going up for servers and bus boys. Never mind that they had their jobs saved and that my wife and I have worked 80+ hour weeks since may without seeing one dime of compensation.

Never mind any of that. We are just greedy assholes.

I used to be a “country club” style manager - give people responsibility, room to grow and the resources they need. This experience is turning me into a tyrant simply because I now realize how people who live in the greatest era of prosperity in human history (despite a recession) can still manage to be “working poor” - their attitude sucks and creates the very conditions that oppress them. Even as their jobs are saved and they start making more money, they insist that they are being exploited when they are, in fact, the only people benefiting from the enterprise.

/Rant off.

Do none of them appreciate what you have done? Are they really like that?