The age of entitlement
 

I stopped at Lowe’s on the way home from work yesterday to get some paint for my son’s school project.

I watched an interesting discussion between a manager and a young female employee.

She walks up, ‘hey I’m heading out’

He says, ‘you still have an hour left in your shift.’

She says, ‘I never took lunch.’

He says, ‘I told you to take lunch earlier.’

She says, ‘yah I know but I’m taking it now.’ And walked off.

If I was him, that would have been her last shift. I could see that he was pissed off. I was for him. I’m pretty sure he went to see his boss about the situation after because a minute or two later, he left the shelving he was working on (unfinished).

How would you handle this situation?

IT happens all the time here......our supervisors are numb to this anymore. The problem is, you fire her but you just replace her with another problem.
Work ethic and self discipline are gone in this country.

People are desperate for workers right now. A local restaurant posted on instagram, "Got a pulse? You're hired", and their only half joking.

As vaccination rates increase, me thinks we need to slow down the aid to get people motivated to go back to work.

I am old school. Start the process if she is off probation, 90 day program (or whatever it is). If on probation, boom, gone. I would rather open up a spot for the POSSIBILITY of finding someone with the right fit than to have a caustic employee infect the whole damn place. You will work just as hard with her there as without.

Call her back and have a very frank discussion with her and start with;

"I told you to take your break and you didn't, correct?"

"Correct"

"What was the reason?"

"I wanted to leave early"

"You need to tell me this before you start your shift. Tomorrow don't come in, I'll find someone else to work your shift."

Many years ago, in the good ol days of an Oklahoma oil boom, money was flowing freely and unemployment was only those that did not want to work. We ran an add in the newspaper (I said it was the old days) for some dark room employees. Thee only calls we received were from prisoners that were still incarcerated, but getting out in a few days. REALLY! Not one other person was interested.

We ended up having to go to 10 hour days for the current employees that wanted time and half for the 10 hours per week extra work.

When I was a Manager I had an unofficial policy of working through lunch in order to leave early, occasionally and for good reason with advanced notice. Of course my staff were all white collar, salaried and exempt. In this situation that guy is hog tied by whatever the policy is. If I were free to act I'd bring her in, tell her she's being docked an hours pay and present her with a written and signed memo describing the policy moving forward.

In today's environment, I think they just need to be happy someone showed up and worked at all . Everything we have all taken for granted is probably going to change in the upcoming years.
People are sick of being a slave to the man for 10 bucks an hour . I get it .
Most of us old guys came from the working generation with a strong work ethic, and even with that, it was hard to stay at ****ty jobs . Ever asked for a day off, and told no ? God, I hated that . Company says, mandatory 6 x 10 hour days. Your reward for that was ??? laid off when it got slow, a raise ?? .25 cents after busting ass all year, and going the extra mile .
Pay a living wage , with benefits, and make it so employees want to stay , perform, and climb the ladder . Otherwise, corporations are just whoring out people to make their stocks go up .

I had a young guy beg and beg me to hire him. He came in twice a week telling me he would be the best worker I ever hired. It went on for almost a month and I finally said OK you start on Monday. Be here at 8 am sharp.

Monday morning (his first day) he calls and says "his next door neighbor has to appear in court and she doesn't have a car so I'm going to take her and wait to bring her home so I might not make it to work".
I told him not to bother.... you're fired.

Great priorities.

I wonder where she was going for the late lunch?

Entitlement covers the whole spectrum of the population. Ever notice how many adds marketed to old people tell them to get "what you're entitled to" or "what you deserve"? It's old Broadway Joes fault!!

entitlement spans all generations.

I get the age of entitlement thing.
There might be 3 sides to this story.
Maybe they laid off staff and there was no way she was going to get done (or with a customer) what she had to if she took a lunch. Now she is pissed and know they won't pay her for the extra hour.
Or she is a beatch.

It's the parents' fault........

and the public school's. They teach this entitlement crap and enable them. I can't stand it.

It’s the clock watching entitlement mentality - I need to show up for 8 hours to get paid. I don’t actually need to ‘show up or do anything’ but my body needs to be in the building to meet the requirements of the job.

I hate dealing with these ‘no minds’ which I why despite my best intentions to support local, I prefer to buy online.

I was talking to someone the other day about how our shopping and retail world has changed.

Walmart put local mom and pop's out of business and brought it all under one roof.
QVC/HSN allowed shopping from your TV and phone at home.
Amazon has allowed shopping to be on your cell phone and delivered within days

What is next?

I can't make an informed decision without pictures.

But in real life my decision would come down to company policy. Being a retail store I am pretty sure they aren't on flex time, and she (maybe) violated provincial law by working X hours without Y minutes off.

She would get one good warning about a) attitude and respect, and b) follow my directions or move on. Next violation, she's gone.

Maybe it was his daughter???

You think this is a new phenomenon?
35 years ago I was training a driver to take over a delivery route. At the end of the day, he asked how typical the hours were. I advised him we were a bit slow this day as I was taking time to train him. He responded that he couldn't take the job as he had a house to work on. I didn't ask him how he planned to pay for the materials.

ya still gotta go out and get hookers and blows you lazy ass:D

I don't know why you called the thread "The age of entitlement." I was an employer for 30 years and I had to deal with dickheaded employees of all ages.

I assume you want to know how I, as the manager, would handle it. In his place how I would handle it would depend on the company protocol as established by the manager's boss. If as the manager I had the power to tell the employee when she would take lunch and had the power to terminate her, I would fire the twit.
If my boss said only he had the power to punish or terminate an employee, I would be lobbying for him to can her.

[QUOTE=911 Rod;11304494]I get the age of entitlement thing.

I don't. I agree with these guys.

“Entitlement covers the whole spectrum of the population. “ - Marv

“entitlement spans all generations.” – Vash

“You think this is a new phenomenon?” - OldE

Nope. You can order in!

I guess you never seen some of the hookup apps?

At our facility she would have a supervisor talk to her for that and be given a final written warning. If she pulled that stunt again in she would be told not to return.

I should add, we prefer to have quality people and will work short rather than have poor workers.

[/QUOTE]and the public school's. They teach this entitlement crap and enable them. I can't standit.[/QUOTE]

Please expound upon this claim, look 171.

My 15 year old boy told me that one of his biggest fears, is that he becomes a workaholic like his dad .

As an employer I hate the new “work ethics”, it’s tough to find good people WITH a good work ethic. A “youngster” that worked for my wife was on social media more than he worked, and he actually told her “I can’t work this much”, sadly he was union and hard to get rid of.

I hope my boys have learned their work ethic from my wife and I...

I work with a few graduates of our state's tech school - the best of a pretty not good state education-wise I guess (though I think the kids from NM State are the most solid of the locals).

More than a few younger ones proudly state "I didn't go to xxxx for four years to go do that..."

An older gent myself, or at least I graduated in the previous century from another Rocky Mountain-centric tech school recalled that we got beaten into us for all of the six years I was there that there was no job beneath us. If it gets the mine moving again, get in there with that plunger...

So funny - I got a load of crap dumped on my desk today and will be doing some pretty menial stuff for the next few days. My response? "Meh, I've been payed to do worse..." I once spent a week picking through shreddings and garbage for one little mistakenly discarded classified trinket. Whatevah - it's a job.

Hey i am a union man..and proud of hardly working.

In my last job they have a picture of me sleeping in a chair with a cigar dangling from my lips.

All i do is sit on the sofa all day and sometimes into the night buying stuff. Like espresso makers..

I used to be the senior technical advisor for one of the worlds largest oilfield service companies. One of my last projects was electrifying, automating, and customizing a fluid injection unit. Basically, I took and older chem van (semi truck and trailer) and we dumped about a million bucks into it making it amazing. In the middle of a chem van is a spill trough and it was nasty.

When I picked up the unit at the base where it was stored, I needed to strip all of the old controls, hydraulics, progressive cavity pumps, etc out of it before it could go to the fab shop. The sump also needed to be scraped out and pressure washed. I asked if there was a ‘broken wing guy’ (someone on modified duty) or anyone on the ‘5hit list’ that could help me. The base manager thought he was funny to say, ‘nope’.

I was happy to do the nasty job knowing I was getting 2-3x the pay of anyone at that base including the base manager... once the base manager figured out who I was and my reporting structure, I had all the help I could ask for.

We are in the worst shape for employees in the 40 years I've been in the restaurant business.

Back in the day my dad worked at Vandyland with a ret AF lite col whose GS 14 position got eliminated. He rifted a guy on base and was watering lettuce at the base bx for GS 14 pay.. That quickly.came to an end when Congress got wind of it..transfering him into the group.my dad was in. Which was monitoring Minute Man missle launchs once a month.

You probably know my peeps from Golden then, even if I'm a simple country metallurgist (it's the Mrs mjohnson that is the ChemE/Petroleum doctor). It's a hard-earned reputation to be known as a group to work hard, and to be able to do what needs to be done. Just doing a good job at anything is a reward in itself - though let's be honest, I do appreciate being grossly overpaid for time to time for just sweeping the floor. ;)

I've been to vandyland for a MMIII launch. It was February and when they do those launches they exercise the entire crew just as much as the missile they plucked from the prairie. So cute to see those kids from Minot, from the junior officers that sit in the LCCs and turn keys to the maintainers that turn wrenches, happy as hell to have a delay and spend another week in SoCal. Didn't see too much entitlement there, that's for sure. Quite a humbling trip...

Yeah Generation Y people. This situation typifies them.

A frriend had a design company full of these people. A bunch of Gen-Y kids swanning around in slow motion. It turned out they were employees :eek: It would hurt me too much to hire someone like this.

And yes, his design company did go bust after a while and now he works for himself out of the converted garage and does OK.

I knew exactly what School of Mines you were referring to in your earlier post...

I know some great people from there.