Luxury.
It’s more that the manager’s receive bonuses for keeping labor and other costs down. This is typical in most corporately-owned retail or food outlets. It’s the reason there never seem to be enough checkstands open when you go someplace like Target - the manager gets a bonus for low labor costs, not for good customer feedback.
That’s one reason I prefer to work for smaller, locally-owned businesses, where the bulk of the manager’s pay is his salary, not bonuses, and where the manager’s primary job is to actually run the business, instead of trying to make his manager look good.
When I saw this thread I immediately thought of that time 5 years ago when that one Walmart re-shelved all of the donations in the Toys for Tots bin because it couldn’t prove they weren’t stolen.
When I worked, briefly, as a cocktail waitress, we had to buy our own tray (the round one you carry drinks on) if you wanted to use one. They cost $25. You also had to buy the shirt you were required to wear, also $25. I never did buy the tray, I just carried the drinks in my hands.
I think Hostile’s Corollary to Occam’s Razor applies here:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by substandard plumbing.”
:eek: Wow! The mantra at the Arby’s I used to work at was, “If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t serve it to the customer.” I never saw anything that could expire get relabeled so it could be used longer. And I know if the general manager had caught anyone doing that she would have fired them immediately. The assistant manager, not so much.
Hey! I worked at Wendy’s in high school and I got a penny raise!
That’s right $.15 a week! I was rolling in the dough.
What, Wendy’s made pizza back then?
The way I read it was that his friend’s mother was also there and also had her hand shaken, so unless the friend had two daddies, the wife wasn’t ignored because she was a woman.
When I worked at Pizza Hut we had a power outage overnight and when we got to work in the morning the refrigerators were warm and had been for many hours. Now, this is July in Phoenix, AZ.
The assistant manager was the opening manager and as I was going through stuff for the salad bar I told him I thought some of it was iffy. He said to put it out anyway. So I did. And then when we opened, I called him out to the salad bar and said, loud enough for all the customers to hear, stuff like “and see here, this ranch dressing? It smells funny, which is probably from being warm all night… and this chocolate pudding has a weird texture…” and pretty much that forced his hand to close the salad bar for the day and take all the stuff down.
Now, I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true–one of the dressings did smell off to me, and several things looked “less than fresh” but I can’t say for certain that anything was actually bad. However, I’d rather have a few people unable to order salad for lunch than have anyone end up with food poisoning, you know? I’ve had it–it sucks.
My Dad had worked in the health industry most of his life as an accountant. He’s seen his share of unethical behavior towards the consumer in regards to health coverage and thought he’d left that behind. Still, life always has something in store to teach him new lessons.
After finishing a stint as a bookkeeper at a grocery store (long story), my Dad was bored and decided that it would be neat to work as a bus driver at the same blood bank my mom had worked at for the past 25 years. It wasn’t all that demanding driving the nurses around the county for various blood drives (except for that 4:30 am rise 'n shine time). But, as time moved along it became less and less fun.
The blood bank was a non-profit organization, and like everything else in the 80’s and 90’s, the salient business model was to cut cost at any cost. Naturally, our supply-side shilling 20 something business manager was always whining about costs and Reagan, not realizing my Dad knew it was more about passive-aggressive power-playing, then saving money. So he just he ignore it, pretending to be keenly interested waiting to see if my Mom would crackup from the obvious sarcasm written on his face.
That all changed one day when Master-of-the-Universe asked the employees to give up their raises because things were so bad for the blood-bank. My Dad knew that ruse: “Look at me! Am I not worthy of promotion and a raise? I saved #% on labor costs for the following year.” Needless to say, after the meeting, my father let some of the more idealistic, altruistic nurses know that this was a con made especially for them. So, with no volunteers, the following meetings with Master-of-the-Universe became even more bloviated and painful; and quickly forgotten afterwards.
Except for one. Master-of-the-Universe was complaining about how high health care costs were hurting the blood bank’s bottom line. But for once, he pointed out a bright spot: a well-liked nurse at the blood bank, who was in the hospital, dying from the final stages of leukemia, was “wasn’t going to be around a lot longer, and that’s going to help us a lot.”
My Dad had to ask other people after the meeting if they had heard the guy really say that.
Wow, Opal, you may not have testicles, but you’ve got some balls! 
I’ve, luckily, never had a crappy job like these, but my friends have. My one friend who is just about the hardest worker there is used to work for Taco Time, and they were pulling the whole closing-off-the-clock spiel. Now, at least it was a lazy asst. manager that didn’t want to get in trouble with the GM for using too many hours, and not like store policy, but still a poor situation nonetheless. When my friend told me about it I told him that was just ridiculous. He thought about it for about a second and promptly agreed. Next night, everyone got paid.
So it’s like your version of bread or corn chips in the US? Neat.
I’m in the US Military, at the training base I’m stationed at, all of the bathrooms have soap in refilled used containers, very rarely having originally been used for soap. Most often it’s an empty Purell hand sanitizer bottle, also common is empty hand lotion bottles. I’m not sure where exactly they got these things from (did they rummage through recycle bins? Take up collections? Just buy a few cases of Purell and wait for it to run out?), but it’s entertaining to see these things sitting next to long-empty soap dispensers in the bathrooms (this is understandable, of course: the soap is all refilled at central locations, then redistributed to the restrooms)