Not enough help

[Can I have a cheeseburger]

On Friday nights we have a fish 'n' chips deal where you get two pieces of fish along with chips and tartar sauce for a killer price. Well this is a great way to bring in customers, but it can only work if you have enough staff to meet demand.

We have only one line cook at one time. He can only make 10 pieces of fish at a time (five orders). This means we aren't able to meet the high demand. At one point last night we had at least five groups of customers on a waiting list for fish. As soon as they were served, there was no fish left again and we had to wait another eight minutes for more fish, and the customers just kept coming. With the one cook now dedicated to doing nothing but making an infinite amount of fish (which all sold before the end of the night), he was not able to work on any other orders, which meant we started running out of other popular things such as perogies. In a place where customers are used to walking up, ordering and taking their food away - a hot deli concept - this is an unacceptable level of service.

This would never have been such a disaster had we had a second line cook to relieve the pressure, and if more fish had been made in advance. Would it really kill them to have someone else come in for three hours to help out? It would cost them under $40, which in the long run they would make up as not spending that money is going to harm sales. If they want to maintain the kind of sales they had last night, they need to spend the money.

But what do I know, I'm just a fourth-year university business major.

[bigpedaler]

Well, CIHAC (can I call you 'Wimpy' for short, after Popeye's burger-eating character?), we poor drones at Wal-Fart, Home of the Big Smiley, have asked that same rhetorical question for years. Unfortunately, the company's 'quiet agenda' is to remain perpetually understaffed, overwork their hourlys, and just hire more when the shortage of workers gets critical, as in when enough hourlys burn out and quit.

Doubletalk is the only answer we ever get.

And THEY, in their infinite retail wisdom, would tell you that you're still just a student, and you can come ask them that after you graduate and create your own multi-billion-dollar conglomerate.

I'm an experienced and trained bike mechanic -- I work there because the shops in town can't match the pay, so I build crap to pay the house note. My co-worker, equally skilled, was recently told that his views on the inherent safety of the BSO's (bike-shaped-objects) we carried were "just opinions", implying that because we didn't DESIGN them, we didn't know. I'm fond of saying that, after eight years of BSO's, I know bikes in general, and these bikes in particular, better than he (the boss) knows his wife's ass. Waiting for a chance to tell him that, as he barely acknowledges me anymore. (He doesn't like that I e-mail home office with problems we encounter that can't be fixed at the store level. He also thinks I'm a barely literate bum who can't express himself -- refuses to believe I compose my own e-mails, thinks someone else is ghost-writing)

A couple months ago, I was subpaeoned for a pair of civil cases involving bikes sold by Wally. One was an obvious wash, but the other, well, they seemed to hammer on pretty hard. My candor was unsettling to the defense (my employer's attorney), but my expertise wowed the plaintiff atty. (He whispered "Awesome!" when told I built my own bike from the frame up off the www) So SOMEBODY thinks I'm an expert, and my opinion carried some weight.

So, the Powers-That-Be will never cave into common sense when given to them from the 'bottom rung'.