Search This Blog

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Yet another reason there are no jobs


            The Patriots, whom I dislike, and the Cardinals, who I am a fan of, have both been hit with recent scandals.  The fans of other teams love to loath the rivals and all the talk on sports radio about how people want to see the team with the trouble “get nailed” is almost astonishingly obtuse by my perspective.  In each case, the investigating authorities have announced that chief suspects are underlings and that management had little idea it was happening. 

            May I point out that this is every business-owner’s nightmare.  That wino you hired as a dishwasher might pinch some woman’s butt in the elevator and she sues you for $50 million.  Your entire business can go bankrupt, simply due to a crazy minimum wage person you hired.  Thus, I predict that fast food will increasingly be automated as fewer and fewer workers start making $15 an hour.  A machine doesn’t have the liability of a rogue employee. Our society is increasingly ordained and ordered by lawyers who defend the lower class workers most susceptible to bad behavior while suing businesses because they aren’t perfect.  And you  wonder why all those people you saw on TV in Baltimore are out of work? 

            Yet to date, I have never heard a pundit on the tellie tell this story.  Business is ultra cautious about who they hire and what they instruct.  Nonetheless, some flunkie is going to try to hack the Astros and then you will lose a dozen draft picks and get fined a couple million.  The entire sport, not just your team will lose repute.

            And it’s not that these are just a few odd happenings.  The general public goes around like a loaded gun looking for litigious events.  The first thing you need to learn to survive in business is to take an interest in customers so that they go away happy or at least proud of themselves that they raised a stink.  Remember, that $29 million hot-coffee spill McDonalds had to pay started because the local manager thought that $488 in doctor bills was excessive and wouldn’t pay for it.  Pay the 488 and send flowers and check on her well-being for two weeks thereafter, dummy!  The public is ready to shake you down. 

            Meanwhile workers are separating into two groups, the haves who get education, skills,  morals and jobs.  The have-nots who are not held to standards for responsibility.  There’s a government program trying to serve everyone who can blame their misbehavior and lack of skills on some sort of victimhood.   

            We ate dinner the other night at a Chinese buffet.  I looked up midway through my won ton and saw a guy come to the cashier and he began hollering about how his food wasn’t done and he was not going to pay for it.  Cashier was the boss who couldn’t come up with words and let this guy stalk off in a huff.  I resisted the urge to follow the lard ass customer and ask whether it was his second or third plate where he noticed the food was unfit.  And didn’t he voluntarily take it off a buffet line?  You took it.  Can’t you just quietly push it aside?  Instead I handed the boss a twenty for our meal and told him to keep the small excess.  “You’ll need it to defray the cost of that Hottentot who refused to pay.  We used to run a restaurant and know what you are going through.”  Suddenly he brightened, going from whipped puppy to businessman again and thanked me for coming to his place. 

            But here’s my point.  This is one more nail in the coffin of entrepreneurship.  Regulate everything to death, demand Obamacare mandates, then play lawsuit roulette, and pretty soon you get an economy that cannot recover from a recession, growing at one and a half percent a year, like Portugal.  Are we proud of ourselves, Americans, for 93 million people who aren’t working?  For negative wage growth since the recession ended? More business closings in 2011-14 than openings—first time that has ever happened in our 408-yr. history?  I dunno.  You still wanna play the game?

No comments:

Post a Comment