ASSETS & LIABILITIES

Over the past few weeks, I've turned over the longest holding staff I have had since we opened. First it was one kid who has worked for me and lived far from the restaurant. He drove into town from about 45 minutes away! He found a job closer to home. Then I caught one of my employees giving friends of his a discount on their food (stealing)! So I terminated him on the spot! (I had wondered how my inventory was so low all the time for some time, but never had any indications of who was responsible) And then most recently, one of my employees who was laid off her previous job got a call back and decided to take the job for the insurance benefits. She was a loyalist who told me that she would be here for 7 years (the amount of time I joked with her about how long it would take to pay off my mortgage on the building.

Now I am searching for new employees, all the candidates of which, I have a hard time dealing with as very few of them have any simple math skills to tell me what the change would be given from a $20.00 bill if the amount due was $16.45 and what 1/3 of $3.00 was! How can people be graduating from secondary school with no third grade math skills?

They also don't have foodservice sanitation licenses, which I was hoping to have in SOMEONE who worked at the restaurant so that I can have a legitimate day off! Someone who is a licensed foodservice manager has to be on all the time. And besides going to the store and such, I have to be there every day! Which I don't really have a problem with as such. But this past year, my mom took a spill and broke her leg, so I would have liked to go visit her or something. As I believe I wrote in a previous blog post, I sent two different employees to the sanitation class, and the one who passed the test ended up not working for me any longer, and the other, couldn't pass the test!

So now I am heading into our summer season with no trained employees. I am heading into this new week with one friend of mine, and a new trainee. I am completely screwed. And again, I am frustrated. It has to work. I have no other choices. I need to make it work! I am going to keep praying for help. And knowing that God will provide. I guess the good thing about this loss of employees is that I am able to save some money on payroll, and catch up on working! It is going to suck completely, having to work harder instead of smarter... but I will make it through. This fall we will hopefully have enough to start our food trailer operation at the school and factories. And by next summer, perhaps have some better trained employees who will actually STICK with us, and be loyalists!

Something is wrong with this generation. You have a 15% unemployment rate in this area, and you are still able to steal from your employer, or job hop from one place to the next with no loyalty to your employer. Those employees who leave voluntarily, I have the option of rehiring if I wanted to. But if someone is going to leave me for another job, why would I consider taking them back? They WASTED my time and money to train them so they could go elsewhere. In my darkest moment, we get to the point where we HAVE to catch ourselves so that we don't fall. The economy is poor, but we can struggle through it and end up on the other end of it, with a LOT of great things! I look forward to this moment. When our sales are up, our payroll and expenses are lower, and we are actually making a profit, rather than borrowing money from mom to get through the next month.