I went from 25 employees in 2006 to only me in 2011. The housing crash kicked my companies butt.

In 2007ish, I turned to my wife and said I miss the early days of my business when it was just 2-3 people. It was much easier with a lot less drama. 25 people? It was non stop drama.

In 2011 my wife reminded me of that day in 2007 and told me I got my wish.

Now business is jumping and has been for about 5 years now, I swore to never get big again.

I have 3 employees and use a ton of tech instead to make work faster and easier.

I toyed with hiring on a 4th person and I am not in the mood to even try.

I just turn work away now and keep it small.

The funny thing, in 2020 I had the most profitable year I have ever had in the last 22 years being in business. Not the most revenue, just most profitable.

The best part is we are turning more revenue now than when I had 12 people working here.

That's wonderful!

Must be the culture at Lowes to accept minimum effort from their employees.
I've never had acceptable customer service at Lowes.
Most the time no store employees are available.
Last time at Lowes I asked where to find something the answer was Lowes doesn't stock it.
Then I find it one aisle away.
never went back.

This guy's a comedian who actually worked at Ikea. Funny stuff, dealing with the public ain't easy....

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eFoWB6LLYJ4" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I have a client ( actually the whole family now ) who is in the restaurant business . I see them constantly advertising for help. They are almost begging, offering good pay, flex hours, and ways to climb the ladder .
The daughter posted this today
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1619270883.jpg

I see that type of employee too much... this is why I choose Amazon over supporting local. This video just made me mad...

What do we do with this dude and Lowe’s girl? What type of job could they actually do?

Funny thing is they all want to make 6 or 7 figures after a year or two of employment and can’t figure out why opportunities don’t fall into their laps... attitude. That’s why.

You are one of the good guys who gets it Fred. There are a lot of employers out there who don't consider their employees to be human beings. To them they are just unreliable production units to be put on line or laid off as needed for efficient production.
It's not hard to understand how some employers get this way. Some employees walk in the door with an attitude that the employer and employee are adversaries. If they come in with that attitude about all you can do is respond in kind. Likewise, if the employer comes in acting like an adversary, he'll get the same attitude back.

Dayum...

On the OP I will note that every relationship is an on-going negotiation. ...and at least the worker is putting in the hours.(adding value.)

Whereas Entitlement is more centered about getting things for who the person is, rather than value that that person provides. - I saw a story about a teacher who got fired for giving Zeros to kids who didn't turn in their assignments.

For the most part we have a meritocracy - people provide value (some provide more than others) and trade on that value. Yet today's younger generation all got participation trophies. They all seem to believe that they have merit, even w/o providing actual value. - Yesterday I watched a couple young (arrogant) Industrial Design consultants squirm in discomfort as approved the work of another on the heals of dismissing their 'contribution.' I have no doubt that they are blaming the customer for their missing the mark. Did I mention their arrogance?

Here it is..

https://www.newsweek.com/teacher-claims-she-was-fired-violating-no-zero-policy-not-giving-students-who-1137573

And now let us wonder why we have a bunch of useless entitled failures.

To be clear, as a manager my mantra is ‘If The company takes care of its employees and their families, the employees will look after the company and its customers.’ This works.

I am probably the most flexible boss you could imagine, my employees respect me and have followed me from company to company. I won’t tolerate people not getting their jobs done (without reason), continued missed milestones, or crappy attitudes.

All of my employees are salaried and I expect them to pitch in more when needed and am totally flexible with letting them take an unaccounted flex day to go skiing or do family stuff provided the work gets done - I don’t care.

When I was 16 in 1987, our town had negative unemployment. I got working papers at 15, though there were only about two places that would hire 15 yr olds then. But when I got to flipping burgers at Wendy's the next summer, I earned double the min. wage. We also had a crew of women on work release from the nearby women's prison. The grocery store had cases of stuff in aisles with signs asking people to apply for a job if they wanted those boxes unpacked.

^^^this! It's nothing new.

what are you trying to say?

Copy and pasted from another site...........

So I am at Walmart scanning and bagging my almost $300 worth of groceries while the employee that wants $15 an hour "monitors" and then this happened.
Her - why are you double bagging all of your groceries?
Me - excuse me?
Her - you are wasting our bags!
Me - if you don't like the way I'm bagging the groceries, feel free to come on over here and bag them yourself.
Her - that's not my job!
Me - okay, then I will bag my groceries how I please if that's all right with you.
Her - why are you using two bags?!
Me - because the bags are weak and I don't want the handles to break or the bottoms to rip out.
Her - well that's because you are putting too much stuff in the bag. If you took half of that stuff out and put it in a different bag then you wouldn't need to double bag.
*10 seconds of me just staring at her.
Me - so you want me to split these items in half and put half of them in a different bag so that I don't have to double bag.
Her - exactly.
Me - so I would still be using two bags to hold the same number of items.
Her - no because you wouldn't be double bagging.
*me pressing two fingers to my left eye in an attempt to make it stop twitching.
Me - okay so here I have a jug of milk and a bottle of juice double bagged. If I take the milk out and remove the double bagging and just put the milk in the single bag and the juice in that single bag I'm still using two bags for these two items.
Her- no because you are not double bagging them so it's not the same number of bags.
*me looking around at about 10 other customers who at this point are enjoying the show.
Me- is this like that Common Core math stuff I keep hearing about?
Her- never mind you just don't get it.
And with that, she went back to her little Podium so she could continue texting or playing games on her phone or whatever it was she was doing before she decided to come over and critique my bagging skills.
Author Unknown

Perhaps that they did not like to do their job?
Or perhaps that they tended to sabotage anyone who was more competent?

I had a gay manager at a fast food restaurant who was whip smart, but was passed over for promotion way too many times.
(and I do mean extremely competent)
Low key, but could fix broken piston rings with bubble gum and tweezers id he was a mechanic instead.
Every serving had to have the exact right portion even during rush and times when he was high as hell.
Food was always cooked right every singe time.
Did menu totals in his head faster than the cash machine. Knew the entire system.
Every employee shift imbalance or dispute was handled. Never any chaos or BS allowed there.
We were always busy as hell because that's how the restaurant was.

I'm trying to say that rwebb doesn't shy away from having multiple user log-ons.

But really, you said that better.

Damn, that is the perfect guy to outsource, for home assembly of the IKEA product line. You could sit with a beer and just take in the show. I assume they have a replacement policy, just in case something is damaged!

So true, we are seeing a lot of these signs in Florida.
Pretty much every bar and restaurant have these on the doors
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1623071722.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1623071722.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1623072062.jpg

I was told to take time off, and it backfired. I got fired on my day off.

Total BS. I had accrued 460 hours of comp time, I was working long hours, 16-17 hours some days, state agency.

I stayed in the same department, lateral move. The manager told me to take some time off, but call him and let him know if I was coming in that day, or that week. I did. One day I decided to go to work, and got walking papers.

Funny thing is, the boss (my mgr's boss) behind it all, said to can me. The head honcho hired me when he retired from the state and went into private business.

I then worked for him for 5 1/2 years, then one day he comes to the office with a conundrum. He was contemplating shutting down, working from home possibly, but wanted my input. He most likely didn't want to feel like he put me out, like the last time. I told him he didn't need me anymore, lets shut it down. We moved out, and that was it.

That was 15 years ago, since, we have both moved, years apart, to the same small town. Pure coincidence, I haven't seen he or his wife in 10 years, but still keep in touch.

I've worked in retail (auto parts). I was the guy that went out of his way to try to help the customer, tried to find the hard to find part, tried to ensure that they had what they needed to get back on the road. And no matter how nice and helpful you are, there's always a slew of jackasses *****ing about you, the store, the parts, trying to con you, trying to scam the store, etc.... Yes, there are some normal people that come through and appreciate what you do. There are also plenty of folks that feel entitled for you to go above and beyond, or feel that no matter how cheap something is or how helpful you've been or how much money they've saved over alternatives that they're getting screwed and they are going to gripe about it.

And that's from the customers, then as an employee, the company is trying to save money which means fewer folks working, a ****ty work environment, low pay, etc....

I was managing my own store after 2 years. My mandatory, minimum weekly schedule was 55 hours. 10 hours Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri and Sat and 5 hours on Wed. And the district manager told everyone that there was probably only one guy in the district that could realistically manage their job in 55 hours, the rest should be working at least 60. I think my usual weeks were 65-ish hours, but there were 80 hour weeks, and once or twice even more. I think I once had a week that was >100 hours. That was in 1994 for $21k/year. If they sent a new store layout that required rearranging all of the aisles/merchandise, 99% of the time managers were told "you can't increase your payroll to get this done. You have to either get your employees to work harder when they are here or you'll have to do it yourself."

We had one of those redesigns come down once. The company had paid some consultant who said "every store should be laid out identically" (which would be impressive since there were probably 100 or 150 different size and shape stores. We were given a "planogram" that showed us how to lay everything out. The planogram was designed for 48" tall shelves. We had 44" tall shelves. I was reprimanded for not getting the planogram done correctly. I was also told "in the old days, the manager would do whatever they had to do to get the merchandise in the store" which would have been in direct conflict with the "every store should look the same" goal of things.

When I was promoted, the previous manager got canned. I think I big part of it was that he did a half assed job of the weekly ordering and only had something like 85-90% of the store's total skus in stock. We had monthly sales goals. If we made the sales goals, I got a small monthly bonus. I went through the first order and had us up to the standard of something like 98-99% in stock. I got the first monthly bonus. The next month, they bumped up my goal 10%. I made that goal too. THe next month, they bumped my monthly goal up 15%, and I made that goal. After 4 months in a row of hitting the goal (full stock of items and happy employees), they bumped my goal up something like 25%. Of course, I didn't meet that goal. They left the goal there for several months. Then after a while, they dropped my goal down to just under what I'd been managing. I got the bonus, then they jacked it back up. I saw that they'd randomly increase and decrease goals to give you the occasional bonus, but make sure that you didn't get too many bonuses. It was too obviously how they'd do it, and wasn't based on a formula or history, it was arbitrary.

Retail is horrible. My dad when he retired got a job at a hardware store. It was a small old Scotty's. After he'd worked there for a while, I was visiting my parents and he had a chat with me.

When you complained about the autoparts store and quit, I thought you were being a pussy.
Now that I'm in retail and see what my store manager is doing, I realize that you were smart and I'm glad that you left. It's a crap job for crap pay.