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?
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