An employee whose job was to be sacked (2010)
henrytapper.com
henrytapper.com
> They also did this because they cashed every last check of every employee that left and there were a lot of those.
"They also did this" - Who also did what? The candidates accepted the job? The company hired the fake guy to get sacked?
And who cashed whose checks? Did they cash them before or after they left? And why does that mean the first set of people did the first thing?
> Made my money back and then some
Made what money back?
My guess is that this is some sort of a shady company where 1. Employees pay something for e.g. training ("check of every employee") 2. Employees make it back over time on commission 3. If an employee quits early the employee's check is cashed by the company. ("they cashed every last check of every employee that left")
A guess however, difficult to understand what is doing on.
"They did this" means they had the actor convince the applicants to take the job. The more employees they hire, the more free hours they get (since the quitters don't pick up their last check)
In reality a call to the Department of Labor or whatever the local equivalent is will get the money, though usually with a pretty big lag time (a threat to call the DoL can be faster).
It was terrible, but fun at the same time. Every call back to the store was greeted with an "Oh that's terrible", "we've had a few other complaints about him" and "I promise he won't be here tomorrow".
If you want more money, put your prices up.
Otherwise how has he refused to tip "even a single penny"? He's merely failed to do so.
The way I understand it, service staff are criminally underpaid (by our standards). This is workable because they make up for the income using tips, which works because tips are larger (I'm not sure which way around cause and effect is here).
This means that when someone in the UK might withhold a tip due to bad service we're just removing a bonus, whereas in the US we're effectively removing their pay for serving us. Not tipping is a much stronger action.
To respond to your 'prices' comment directly - the person delivering the pizza doesn't get to set the prices. They have to take the job that they can in a service industry that pays peanuts on the basis that people will earn tips. And the business doesn't have any incentive to do anything about it - they get to pay people less and therefore keep margins high and/or charge lower prices to compete.
My visits are short, and the level of service would normally deserve a tip anyway.
As I understand it this was promoted by business owners themselves (which makes a certain kind of sense because it offloads the risk of a slow night onto their employees).
The federal government allows tip based workers to be paid only $2.13/hour by their employer but they must make at least $7.25/hour after tips. But in my state they have to be paid at least $10+/hour before tips.
It's not attitude, they do underpay certain people. But at the same time various US pizza places do include a service or delivery fee which still doesn't go to the driver. As a result you might pay a delivery fee which is isn't a delivery fee.
In a restaurant if they don't get tipped enough the restaurant has to make up the difference / pay them minimum wage (though this rule to differ per state). So not paying still should result in minimum wage.
From what I understood in US it's rather arbitrary whom you pay extra and which persons you do not (e.g. even pay extra to get a haircut). Once you travel more you'll notice these rules are rather arbitrary (custom in one country, totally unexpected in another). For restaurants I often don't go back to the same place twice so I don't see the point of randomly paying more. As result I'm trying to stop doing that (it feels impolite, this despite me sometimes being unique in adding giving a tip). Paying by bankcard helps to avoid tipping.
Going back to pizza delivery, in my country (not US) the delivery fee is often included in the pizza. This is done by offering a pretty huge discount for picking up a pizza.
In principle this is true; in practice it is rarely honored.
> From what I understood in US it's rather arbitrary whom you pay extra and which persons you do not (e.g. even pay extra to get a haircut). Once you travel more you'll notice these rules are rather arbitrary (custom in one country, totally unexpected in another). For restaurants I often don't go back to the same place twice so I don't see the point of randomly paying more. As result I'm trying to stop doing that (it feels impolite, this despite me sometimes being unique in adding giving a tip). Paying by bankcard helps to avoid tipping.
All customs are arbitrary to some extent, but the rule of thumb is that if you're getting a personal service from someone who's not a professional you should tip.
Good rule of thumb but I think it can still trip up non-Americans to some degree.
Best tipping I ever had was working at a fancy hotel - paid a decent service industry wage and would regular get tips of $10-20.
If the driver wants more money he needs to negotiate that with his employer.
It's not the customer's responsibility to pay over the quoted price just because the driver thinks he is underpaid.
A business should set it prices so that it fulfils it responsibilities (including to it staff). If the business cannot run at the prices so set then it fails. That is not the responsibility of the customer to make the business successful. It is the business' rite of passage to provide services or goods that customers want to buy,
If I was to negotiate with some other party that whenever you came within 100 metres of my awesomeness that you would be required to pay me 4000 drachma, what would your response be? The acting of tipping is a personal acknowledgement that the person has placed your actions so far above the norm that they consider it appropriate to honour you in some way.
What you are wanting is to have other people say that your actions are so outstanding that, even though they are nothing actually extraordinary, you should get something extra because of your awesomeness.
If you are not getting paid for doing your job, why on earth are still working for the tightwad (your words) who has employed you?
You are conflating a private negotiation as though it is a public interaction. It's not.
I have worked for lots of different companies over many years. My own attitude is that if the employer is not worth working for, then you don't work for them. If they pay rubbish wages for serious work, you don't deal with them. If they are tardy paying you, then you finish up with them and move on.
If I need to work in a remote place to cover the bills I have, then I work in a remote place. If I have to change industries or learn a new job then I will and have done so. If you don't consider yourself worthy of fair wages then that's a problem you have to get over.
Too many people think they are constrained by their circumstances and instead of doing something, they wallow in self pity. I have met those who had nothing or had lost everything due to circumstance and they have been an inspiration because they made a choice to do something about it.
That is not really what tipping means in the United States.
> I have worked for lots of different companies over many years. My own attitude is that if the employer is not worth working for, then you don't work for them. If they pay rubbish wages for serious work, you don't deal with them. If they are tardy paying you, then you finish up with them and move on.
Yeah, I don't think your experiences as a computer programmer are necessarily applicable to someone who works as a waiter at a greasy spoon or as a pizza delivery driver. I'm gonna guess you've never been in a position where you had to do low-wage work. It's not a negotiating kind of a situation; it's a "take it or leave it" kind of situation.
In US most states have to make up to ensure people are paid at least minimum wage. Even if that's not the case, it's the governments responsibility (in case employers don't) to ensure people get paid enough. This as individual employees don't have a strong negotiation ability.
A customer is not obliged at all to tip; not unless the definition didn't suddenly change from "a sum of money given to someone as a reward for a service.". It should be a reward, not an expectation or even an insult when you don't receive it.
Any services provided by the employee to the customer are as a business representative. They are a function of the agreement between the business and the employee. If the employee decides that he or she should, by their own estimation, provide a service that is well and truly beyond what they are doing as the business representative then they are doing so on their own behalf. If the customer then believes an appropriate reward is to be given for that exemplary service, then it is the customer's right to choose such an action.
It is not an obligation but a freely chosen reward.
Furthermore, I'm going to make the assumption that, since you're posting here, you're probably living a pretty comfortable life, and yet here you are making your point by picking the pockets of low-wage workers. What word do you think describes someone who does this better than "cheapskate"? If you are so troubled by this structure that you feel you must take a stand, stay home or visit a restaurant that doesn't accept tips.
The only ones picking the pockets of low-wage workers are those who are responsible for paying those workers - the businesses they work for (they are the cheapskate - not the customer). A customer is not responsible for the workers failure to negotiate a fair wage nor are they responsible for the failure of those workers to find better employment.
If you want it fixed then fix it where it needs to be fixed first - the negotiation of wages between business and employee. If you work for a robber baron then expected to treated like a serf or villain.
It's that simple, but it doesn't work in American tipping culture.
- Increased marketing
- Upgrading facilities
- Moving facilities
- Hiring more drivers at the same wages
- Paying off corporate debt
- Acquiring more corporate debt
- Owner salary
- Owner profit
Most of which would have an outsized impact on the health of the company compared to changing the driver's salary from $8/hr to $10/hr.
It's not just "a bit impolite" to not tip service staff in an American context; it's a grave insult that most people would only do in response to service they thought was shockingly below adequacy -- and likely they wouldn't even patronize the business again after doing so.
I had a long argument with two Americans of the USA variety about tipping. The attitude they displayed about tipping was that it was "criminal" if a customer didn't tip. My argument was that, since I was NOT a party to the employment agreement between business and employee, I had no responsibility to make up any shortfall between minimum wage and what the business was paying the employee.
It was interesting that they felt very strongly that even though you, as a customer, were not part of the the business/employee employment agreement, you still had a moral obligation to ensure that the employees got their due. They could not understand that the employee was a representative of the business and that the charges for service (of whatever kind) to the customer were set by the business by their prices. Any other charges had to be up front (and not called gratuities).
The Americans of the USA variety do not seem to understand that a gratuity is a freely offered gift on the part of the person giving it and it is in no way a requirement to be given. Otherwise, it is not a gratuity.
It seems to me that the attitude towards tipping in the USA makes it one of the tenth world countries where the society has no concept of an employer paying an employee a fair wage for the work being done.
Now, I don't have a problem with tipping (at my discretion) for above and beyond the call of duty service. However, for normal service being provided by a business, it is not appropriate for that business and employees to have an expectation that I make up any shortfall in living wages agreed between business and employee.
I'll go further: if you are visiting a different country you should make an effort to adhere to their basic norms of behavior. If I go to Japan and I see a shoe rack at the entryway of a building I am not going to traipse around the building in my shoes, even though nobody would think this behavior was unusual at home.
Also, if I were going to carry out your policy, I would not plan on visiting the same restaurant twice.
The only tightwads here are the businesses (and the employees who agree with their policies) who will not pay their employees a fair wage. Again, it is not the responsibility of the customer to ensure that a business survives and thrives. My question to you is "Are you a business owner who does this and are now trying to justify your actions?"
So, you are in agreement with the customs of other countries that women should be treated as second class citizens. You are espousing the treatment of employees by their employers as second class citizens. Your comparison to shoe removal in Japan is not even in the league of the social injustice attitude of not paying employees a fair wage.
In my country, tipping is not the custom as we have minimum wages to adhere to and if a business doesn't do this, those in charge are prosecuted.
Finally, I have no intention of ever visiting the USA. The way its citizens are treated is appalling enough, how it treats its visitors is even worse.
I don't have the personality to do this - I am considered to be far too blunt and abrasive. Yet, even though I am this, I consider it extremely important to treat my clients in a manner that says that I will solve their problems and actually do this. None of this work ever involved tips, it was a part of the service that I thought necessary.
Also when a bomb explodes, of course, all evidences point toward him even though is the very definition of innocence.
Wonderful work from the great Daniel Pennac, which can stand on it's own, but has follow up tomes that are just as nice.
And I just looked it up, it's been translated to english.
The title, is, well, "The scapegoat".
It always made me think of L'Arrache-Coeur by Boris Vian, where we can find "La Gloïre", this old man whose job was to literally swallow the shame of everybody else.
http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-5-weirdest-but-best-jobs-for...
Those who are not educated from East Asia can't easily come to the US illegally as those who can cross overland (Mexico and central America) can. Poor Chinese villagers are not boating to America.
First, much of East Asia has extremely demanding placement tests for elite high schools (and sometimes lower schools). You might reasonably say that we're only taking students from good high schools around the world, but that's a comment about school quality, not students. As people often point out, Harvard dropouts are almost as successful as Harvard grads - merely getting in represents a powerful filter. So it's plausible that we're taking rich/educated elites worldwide, but in East Asia we've got a talent/skill filter comparable to college admissions being applied in advance.
Second, your point: there's a non-trivial penalty for being a Chinese applicant to a US college, and it's not particularly obvious what impact that has. I suppose it could be that the harsher requirements for acceptance are driving the difference, and we don't have any real evidence on how responsive outcomes are to changing that restriction. (Is there a good breakdown of outcomes for a given group by visa type? That might show whether nation-specific admission rules on some visa types are changing outcomes.)
(The third thought, of course, is "it's a huge multifactorial mess and there's probably not enough data to trust any conclusion we come to".)
Second: The non-trivial penalty came AFTER Chinese people became over-represented.
It's not as complicated as you're trying to make it out to be. Something is causing East Asians to outperform us in basically every positive trait. They have higher IQs, higher incomes, lower criminality rates, lower poverty rates, etc. And these stats hold true even generations after immigration. Maybe it feels complicated because you're concerned about the root cause analysis. I'm not. They're doing great, we should want great people here.
(I agree that if the penalty came after better outcomes, it's not a relevant factor. I wasn't familiar enough with which restrictions were in place when to say.)
But yes: the complicated part is root causes, and that's not relevant to whether we should expand our visa/citizenship program; we certainly should. If someone in the thread disagrees with you there, it's not me.
He’s back in the UK now, last summer several of his ex pat friends and colleagues were busted by investigators parachuted in from Beijing. They were detained, their visas were revoked and given a week to get out of the country. Fortunately he was in Beijing when it happened and got Chinese colleagues to clear out his stuff and any paperwork from the college, but he had to roll up all his gigs.
Kind of reminiscent of one of the first episodes in the series 'Suits' where Louis Litt is interviewing a new junior employee for the firm, and he pulls in another junior mid-interview to dress him down and dismiss him in front of the new employee, just to put the fear of his authority and power into the newbie. The 'fired' employee then just goes back to the bull pen to await being called in for the next new recruit interview so he can walk past and be 'randomly' called in.
It was weird to recieve little training for what seemed to be an investigator type role.
Mid way though the day a bunch of suits arrived, toured the office, and went into a meeting. Later they left and we were told to go home.
Clearly we were faking something, maybe an inflated company sale or a bid for a contract.
The wierd thing was, the stacks of paper were real classified police files, with genuine contents (we were phoning people).
He had a large office space already, in preparation for growth, but only 1 employee at that stage, so he got his high school aged daughter in, as well as some of her friends to sit in the empty desks and pretend to work. A couple of the PC's at the back facing away from the meeting room weren't even plugged in, and were just screens on the desk and keyboards attached to nothing.
It worked - he got the contract, and as a result, now has REAL employees at those stations, and in fact has to look at a bigger space to expand into.
If that wasn't intentional, it should have been.
I've also met people who've earned temp "work" in China being nothing more than white faces in the background to make the company look international to visitors
He came to some big city posing as a successful businessman seeking investors for some new enterprise. He would give as a reference the president of a local bank located on the other side of town.
When the potential investors went to that bank to check out the reference, they found a busy, well equipped, and well furnished bank, full of well dressed obviously upper class clients conducting business. When they spoke to the President and other officers all they heard was praise for the honesty and business skills of the con man. The marks would then make a large investment.
When the con man left town with their money and they realized something was wrong, and then went to the bank to try to find out what was going on, they found an empty building with a "for lease" sign, and many of the people they had seen as customers and employees in the bank were now seen to be beggars, prostitutes, and such from the neighborhood that the con man had hired to play customers and employees.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bloodletters-Badmen-Narrative-Encyclo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Big_...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...
Even within this well-educated microclimate, the irony in that statement might not be clear enough to everyone.
May I suggest either crystal clear irony ("the most eminent intellectual of our times Steve Bannon") or a more accurate description ("the racist firebrand Steve Bannon")?
There's actually a good Freakanomics episode on this[1]. How tickets are undervalued and part of Ticketmaster's value is that they take blame for the high prices.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...
It is absolutely not a normal type market, and it shouldn't be treated like one. The way forward is not to inflate ticket prices, ensuring only the richest fans can afford to go to concerts, and screwing over the ordinary people.
The way forward is to make it illegal to resell tickets at higher than face value. That was implemented some years ago here, and scalping is a minor issue now. Fans are generally very good at self-policing and reporting price-gouging scalpers. Ticket prices did increase slightly over time, but certainly not on the level of $50 becoming $500, as posited in the article.
They do touch on that, but I don't think the solution is to completely stop resale. Just limit it to face value or less.
If artists were only interested in short-term profit, they would jack up the prices and only sell to their richest fans. But most of them look at the long perspective, the fact that there's a lot more to be gained in the long run by having a loyal fanbase that doesn't feel exploited.
For the fans who were complaining that they couldn't get tickets for low-seating high-interest events, well that's just too bad. You had the same chance as everyone else. I've sat in ticket queues (offline and online), I've furiously refreshed ticket pages for events with room for less than 100 people just to be sure to get a ticket, 5+ months in advance. I really like the system we have here, where a big wallet is not some kind of guarantee that you'll get a ticket.
If events get sold out, the onus is on the organizers and artists to either book additional shows, or come back again in 6 months or a year, possibly at a bigger venue.
If someone is a true fan, they'll be bummed about missing out, but also adamant to not miss out next time. And they certainly don't fly across the Atlantic for a Broadway show without having somehow secured a ticket beforehand. That's just silly.
These same arguments are / were used in favor of unpaid internships. Except, of course, that it takes a certain level of financial freedom or support to do things like wait in lines for concert tickets. Just because your paying time instead of money in these queues, does not mean that it doesn't carry a cost.
The tickets have to be put up for sale at some specific time that is usually advertised well in advance, which allows (most) people to plan for it. For some artists, a number of tickets are sold earlier to members of the official fan clubs and so on.
What is the alternative? Putting the tickets up for sale as a slow drop? I'm pretty sure that would significantly harm sales.
If the principle being striven for is fair, then most fair to me would be to allow all potential attendees to participate in the sale. If there are more participants than tickets, then the most fair mechanism which does not reward time-rich participants is random lottery, not a queue. A queue rewards those who happen to be available for registration the moment it opens.
Not everything can be 100% optimal and profit maximized. The current ticket sales method works great, if you eliminate the rent-seeking scalpers, through simple regulation.
However, ideally we should also consider it shameful to buy from scalpers. You run a high risk being scammed, they can resell the same ticket multiple times, and you have no recourse.
Any friction you introduce other than "being a fan" is just a convoluted way to hide the real market prices, and that's exactly the margin where scalpers operate. As for "being a fan", it's very hard to quantify and operationalize.
Hopefully your boss figured that out or was moved out of a leadership position.
It's roughly the equivalent of a developer that writes shit code with concurrency issues, basic code smells, etc...that would be drummed out in short order. For some reason, we don't hold leaders to the same standard.
See: Politics throughout the entirety of human history.
Reminded :) Russian military officer training - when you tear a new one to your subordinate, you have to do it in front of his peers, and that is the most important part of the process. The course was taught by a colonel with PhD in psychology.
So that if something goes so badly wrong that the CEO would otherwise be the one put in jail, in this case the CCO goes instead?
"In order for her kitchen staff to acknowledge her authority, Monica hires Joey so she can fire him in front of them."
Oh! now that I think about it.. guess who always gets called back by those managers for new projects! :)
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Also when I worked retail back when high school kids held the minimum wage jobs, annual retail turnover often exceeded 100%, so if lady waffles is having multiple problems in a couple months, your store has a problem far beyond angry waffles.
The American version at the store I worked at both as a labor drone and eventually as a night shift manager while in school, was to send coworkers to the office to be yelled at. The store was urban and near the bar district so at night, customers were generally drunk and guilty until proven innocent. Drunk people usually don't want to draw attention to themselves, mostly, so we had few complaints.
Its a mid to high skilled workplace thing to assume employees are yelled at. For manual labor work, the cost of replacement, either of the job or the employee, is very low, and most firing offenses had legal involvement (stealing cash or product from the store, for example) so discipline never went much beyond asking someone "WTF?".