As the Burger turns Part 1

06/27/2020 at purt near 8:00 a.m. or so, and it is Saturday

COVID-19 update in the USA

2,510,000 Cases of the virus

   127,000 Deaths

   771,000 Recovered

So anyway, go get your drink and go pee and then come back and don't be so damn impatient, cop a squat and read for a spell,

The title of this post is the start of my soap opera for old people called "As the Burger Turns" or it could be titled "Tales from the Grill" or maybe even "Flipping for posterity", not sure what to call it yet. Anyway, to make this clear right from the start, everything in this post is wholly created from my own recollections, which may be faulty because I am old, or because I choose to lie about it, take your pick. At any rate, everything I post here today belongs to me, the good the bad and the ugly, and is a product of my highly developed imagination. If I use a situation that you know about and it was actually different, then SHADDUP! , just read it and don't ruin a good story with a correction about some trivial things called facts. It's a story, stories are based on what people think and everybody knows that people lie. There, I just had to say that.

Look, I totally get and understand that things change and nothing ever stays the same. Not hard to understand not really, except for how fast TV Networks like FOX cancel good TV shows, replace them with shit and it makes sense to keep that in mind. The way it used to be is not a guarantee that that is the way it will stay. Especially if some money-grubbing capitalist is in charge of the money and all they want is MORE, MORE, MORE. If that is the goal, then everything that happens including the firing of some very talented people is a result of that concept. Basically, that's how American business is run today.

The accountant is in charge and nothing they do is really about growth, not really, everything they do and every decision they make is about cost containment and not much else. Even when those decisions have nothing to do with how the business is run, and everything to do with lowering costs, that's how they approach the process. We used to call that managing from the bottom up, meaning start with the profit line and back everything up to Sales even when what you do may hurt revenue, you still accomplished your goal. It's business killer sometimes, but accountants can't see it that way, they are trained to see it only one way. Similar to them are folks like stock traders, people who buy and sell REITs, derivative traders, hedge fund managers, and so on.

So I spent a great deal of my life working in the Food Industry, from about 1974 until about 2014, I worked in some role working, managing or supporting this industry primarily for two different organizations. Some people call the segments I worked in the lower ends of the business, however, I prefer to call it the busier ends because the casual dining and QSR segments account for about 3 out of 4 dollars of every dollar spent on food by consumers in restaurants. We used to jokingly call that our S.O.S. (Share of Stomach).

I worked for Steak `n Shake in one capacity or another for about 28 years total, serving as an employee in service and food production, as  Unit and District manager, corporate department manager, and with a franchise as their District Manager and later as their IT support. I also spent about 10 years or so with The Krystal Corporation when they were headquartered in Chattanooga TN as a restaurant inspector, a District Manager, and as the Corporate Manager in Charge of the restaurant inspection process as well as the customer complaint program. So you could say I have seen a lot of changes in my time in the restaurant business.

I was part of a team that began to serve Breakfast and helped to roll it out in all company stores, one of my early Bosses was in charge of introducing the 24-hour concept to the Louisville KY and later to the Indiana markets. I worked inside the process of converting the brand to a drive-thru based concept from one where the central service aspect was based on car side service (we called it "curb service" back then). We changed again from one production line unit to a dual cook line process and then again as well converted from a stark black and white tiled restaurant to one that closely mimicked a casual dining restaurant (we called it a coffee shop). They had common names for upgraded units like "Proto 1", and "Proto 2", they were very imaginative.

We went through a period of time where the company was trying to figure out how to reduce manpower from the methods of the 70s to be more competitive in the future. When I first started to work for them I think their philosophy was to "pay 'em cheap and stack 'em deep", as the change of shift in 1974 in the Madison Avenue unit was to line up in the Dishwashing area, by the station and everyone came on the line at the same time and checked their stations, then relieved the operator and only then could they could go home. Monday had about the same staff as a Saturday night did in basic numbers, except you may add a second fountain person, or a grill helper or an additional person here or there as sales dictated. I cannot exactly remember but I think the minimum wage was about $1.75 per hour back then, so you could do that as help was cheap, and there was no lack of applicants. For about 10 years starting when I did in 1974 it was a buyers market, you never had trouble staffing a restaurant and could turn away every idiot that applied. It has never been like that time, since then.

The company did all sorts of stuff to stay ahead of the competition, to stay relevant, like they added carpet, plants, overhanging ferns, did away with Chrome-based tables and chrome-based chairs, and then added a classy looking but terribly uncomfortable black and red motif table and chair setup. We changed from pound away cash registers where you literally had to pound the keys to ring a sale to a more computerized system called a "Documenter", made by Addressograph Multigraph corp. (ADM). Programmed by a tape reader, when the register had to be re-programmed, they sent a technician to re-load it using a spool of punched tape (and you better know where yours was!!), that was hooked up the register and read by a special reader. later we changed several times until the touch screens that are all the rage today came into use. These were the best as you could just see them being destroyed by the grill cooks as they used their spatulas to hit the bump bars. It was great he said sarcastically.

We went through lots of periods of change, where the company did all kinds of things to stay relevant. We tried a big 1/3 pound burger, we changed french fries to a just like mickey D's fry (that customers hated and we changed right back), we served a drink called "King Cola" that was a brand owned by Mr. Kelley who was also our owner, we changed from gas grills and single vat fryers to Electric grills and multi-vat fryers, we changed the shake mixer from single head units mounted on the milk machines to one that could mix 5 shakes at a time. There were changes that defined an era too like the addition of 3 Melt sandwiches that pretty much ended the era of a single grill person being able to run the grill when it was busy. Change in the restaurant business is a way of life and it has always been that way. The uniform has changed about 100 times in that time frame. When my oldest brother Clyde worked for Steak `n Shake, he wore all white, except for shoes and a bow tie and a cumberbund. Talk about a pain in the ass to keep clean, geez Louise!

We once endured a time and motion study conducted by our own training department that was the biggest herky-jerky pain in the rectum piece of crap I ever saw. It was I think designed to destroy your ability to take care of business, as it asked questions and measured things like "How long could you leave a dirty table dirty" until you absolutely had to clean it? How many people did you have to have on duty to take care of a minimum amount of business? It brought on the era of employees being made to do the work of more than one person even when you were slam dunk busy. I hated that crap and still do. I can remember faking those bar charts and only got caught once or twice. I ran great labor control according to their budgets (well most times I did, not always),  and still got my ass chewed because I didn't use the stupid bar charts. I know, I know, it was their business and they get to dictate how you run it, I get that. But if everyone took care of their money like I and a few others of us did, and they learned from that, they would not have the issues they have today, COVID-19 be damned.

So anyway, after a while after I first started, I took a transfer to Washington St and Franklin Rd in Indianapolis IN. I applied to join the M.T. program, not to be confused with the M.I.T. program. The M.T. program (Manager Trainee) and the M.I.T. (Manager in Training) program were different things as the first one was an employee promoted through the ranks, they were generally looked down upon as the lesser manager and the M.I.T. program was a Manager who was hired from outside the company. They were allegedly already a manager and were expected to act and look like one, although I rarely found that to be the case. Really what it meant it meant to be an M.T. is that you now had some free labor you that you could work the dog shit out of. They even had a racist nickname for it and called us "coolie labor", a coolie being a like a Chinese peasant from the early 1900s who worked on the railroads for little more than room and board. 

The M.I.T. might be smart enough to be a manager but didn't know a thing about working in this concept and they were usually dumber than a brick. I firmly believe that to this day. Anyway, after about 4-6 weeks of "evaluations" meaning I worked every crappy shift there was and every crappy schedule you could be given to see if I could or would "take it", I was accepted into the 26-week training program. Guess what the main emphasis was? That's right, once again,  I worked every crappy shift there was and every crappy schedule you could be given to see if I could or would "take it". I don't remember there being very much manager training during the first 4 weeks. Soon though, everything changed.

Stay Tuned tomorrow for more of "As the Burger Turns"

BigMike