Interesting comment on Papa Murphys. The landlord of our center allowed a Papa Murphy’s to locate there. Our pizzas are higher end in terms of quality, portions and price. PM has not effected our business and, frankly, they are not doing well at all. I bought a couple of pizzas just to check. I just do not believe our customers would be customers of Papa Murphys. PM serves a certain demographic looking for price I think. I have never heard anyone say, “I got this really good pizza”. They have a market to serve and apparently they are doing well with it but not in our center or area. So I guess when we see a poll that indicates PM is America’s favorite pizza you should identify, “who are the customers?”.
The second post from GotRocks also caught my eye (about employees). We are going on our third year without being fully staffed. Last week we lost two people at one location and two at another. We had some advance notice (two just did not show up one day) so besides our signs we posted ads and pushed some other buttons. We got two applicants over a space of 5 days. I have mentioned this before but it is worth repeating. We have some applicants who will flat out tell you than unless we pay much more money they would rather get unemployment payments. I still remember some time ago when we had a really good cook applicant. He fit within our pay range for cooks at $12 to $14 an hour. After talking to him for some time we found out that he lives with his girlfriend. They trade off. One works and one draws unemployment and then they switch after a certain amount of time passes. We are raising a new generation that is learning that they can live a great life just living off government welfare not realizing that they are selling their souls. Once you get that mindset of always looking for the freebie it is very difficult to get out of the cycle.
The quality of applicants has also dropped. They think its ok to tell us on Friday that they need the next day off. We work with people if they give us notice before the schedule is posted the week before but this is absurd. Far to many think its o.k. to show up late or not show up at all and then expect to keep their jobs. Then there are the cell phones. We explain upfront that we commit to paying someone for X amount of hours. Their part of the bargain is that they show up, they work and they stay focused on the tasks at hand. We explain that using their cell phones while working means they are not focused on their tasks and especially our customers. The last employee we terminated, after he was warned three times not to use his cell phone while working, was shocked that he was being terminated. More shocking to us was the fact that his father called us to protest the termination and threatened to get a lawyer. Where are the real parents out there teaching their kids about the rules of life? These kids are going to have a very difficult time going into adulthood and our country will be the worse for it. I think of this every time I see protests, riots or whatever in this country. They want free education, free healthcare, you name it they think they are entitled to it. And they they want to tell the colleges and universities how to run their institutions. They want to take out loans to pay for college and then have the loans forgiven. That is fine and dandy but not when somebody else has to pay for those entitlements. I read the other day that some member of Congress was putting forth the idea that we should actually pay students to go to college. Our school systems today do a good job of indoctrinating instead of teaching. As long as you feel good about yourself you deserve a passing grade. Are the tests to difficult? Are the grading standards to difficult? Well, this is not fair, so lets lower the standards. What kind of an effect does this have on our country?
We are reaping what we sow and the cancer is spreading throughout society.
