Bean Crock

What in the hell am I doing? It is 5 a.m. on 06/06/2020 and I am wide awake writing a blog.
There's gotta be a better way to spend a Saturday morning. I used to be so hard to wake up.

Well anyway the time is here and I am here and this thing is open, so let's get to it, shall we?

I saw a video of Piers Morgan interviewing Rudy Guilliani yesterday.

But Before I get into that just let me say two things. 1) I try to as much as possible to stay above the fray, and nonpolitical in the blog posts I write now because no one wants to read a bunch of drivel about what I think about whatever politician I'm blathering on about, I mean boo-hoo, get over it, whatever. and 2) I, as a general rule, don't care for Piers Morgan because he is a stupid ass who doesn't do his homework, doesn't actually understand America, and I believe that he is only broadcasting here for the money in the first place. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with doing it for the money, but he is so blatant about his disdain for life here, in everything he does, I don't know why he keeps producing shows for US consumption.

Anyway....

There was this video of him attempting to do an interview with Rudy. Now whatever you think of Rudy I'm good with whatever you think. You think he is a hero, ok. You think he is an idiot, I'm ok with that too, You can think whatever you want to and I do not have an objection. This interview however made me laugh out loud and I tried to remain objective and see it through to the end without judgment and just couldn't. Rudy got pissed off when Piers told him he had gone "barking mad" and was quite deranged and his reaction was not only classic Rudy, It was an instant must save to the playlist of meme makers worldwide I'm sure. Check it out right here --> Rudy is Barking Mad
To me it was hysterical and the interview could have been conducted by the Fairy Godmother and it still would have been hysterical. Rudy got incensed and told Piers he "Effed up" only he said the real word, you could see his face got red and Morgan got under his skin when he told him he was deranged. The best part of Rudy's response was right after this exchange “When I used to interview you, you were an intelligent reasonable man and you’ve gone completely mad and you sound deranged,” Morgan said. “You’re abusive and it’s really sad to see what’s happened to you.”

Rudy went off the rails. It's funny as hell. My sides hurt from laughing at these two idiots.

Enough of that. Whew! To change the subject entirely...

You know some of the best memories I have about my chosen profession have nothing to do with the companies I worked for or the products they sold. It had nothing to do with the uniforms we had to wear or the hours they made us work. It had everything however to do with the people that I worked around. I can remember virtually nothing about specific days or shifts but have a ton of memories centered around some of the best folks to ever strap on a name badge. I wonder if that is weird?

I do not want to call anybody out, but the stories I could tell about the people and the laughs I had with them were just classic stuff. We did a lot of off the wall activities that only meant something to us and the customers around us probably never had a clue there was ever anything going on. One of my bosses for example, used to have a thing about having a daily goal and making sure that all the crew members knew what the daily goal was, so we invented ways to make sure everybody knew the daily goal and the real daily goal. Instead of fighting with him about something we all thought was overkill and calling him something like Gung-ho Food Burger boy behind his back, we would just figure a way to do as he requested and thumb our collective nose at him at the same time. Talk about a team icebreaker! What fun. Sometime I'll tell you all about "Hey Dick!"

If the daily goal was, for example, to have a low drive-thru time I would communicate it to everyone by either announcing it or writing it down somewhere or putting is on the assignments sheet (the line up). That was the daily goal we had written down just in case anyone ever asked us if the crew knew the goal. In this manner we were communicating the daily goal, he was happy, we did what we always did, which was to kick ass and throw food out as fast as humanly possible, and then the real goal was somewhere hidden that only we knew about. Sometimes, for example, I would take the label maker and put something on the back of my name tag (yes I had to wear a flipping name tag just like everybody else), so that if you flipped it up on the pin, there was a statement on the back of it that said the real goal. Sometimes the statement was comical and sometimes it was something semi-vulgar written in our language code only we knew. Sorta like STFU is today. Everybody knows what it means but none of the actual words are spelled out so as to not get into trouble for saying it out loud in front of customers. Stated Goal "Food Cost", secret goal "GTFAB" (Go the f**k away Boss). That was a blast. We used to do stuff just to break the day up and make it not boring.

In the restaurants, I managed I used to make it a game for myself to hire and manage some of the most talented people you could find. It wasn't easy but one of the things I did best was taking a bunch of strong and independent personalities and teach them to work together as a team and then challenge them to beat the crap out of whatever the company goals were. I used to go to these manager meetings where other managers would say stuff like "How did you get your A.C.E. (Average Customer Expenditure) to be so high? You are so high above us you must be cheating." I can't tell you how many times I got audited by the company looking for how we were doing it. The QA evaluators got sick of coming to my store doing ticket audits and watching servers. I used to laugh my ass off as I was giving these long and windy big ass-BULLSHIT answers to their questions about training and repetition and expectations and so on and so forth and I would never tell them how it was done. See the secret was to let the servers in on a little secret of their own. Servers are entirely motivated by money, well that and getting off early after making a lot of money.

People tipped based on the size of their check. Whatever the check was in total, even back then, most folks would either have a standard tip, like 50 cents for coffee or at minimum $1 for even a small purchase, or they would tip a percentage, like say 10%, 15% or 20% of their check. Assuming the food was good (and it was) and it was served fast (it was) then the service would dictate the amount of the check. I put all my effort into teaching serving as a science about how to suck money out of customers' wallets. It wasn't exactly following the stated rules of the company but it wasn't against them either. That was my specialty, finding the holes in the rules and exploiting them to our advantage.

For example, the rules about serving at the famous burger place I worked for, said suggestive selling was a technique used to compliment a customer's stated intention or purpose as they identified what food they wanted. They would order a sandwich and a drink, we were supposed to offer them side orders to compliment their purchase. Simple huh? I just changed the assumption about their intention. In the drive-thru, we never ever asked that ridiculous question concerning size for example. If a customer said they wanted a soft drink, they received a large drink unless they said specifically they wanted a different size. Same thing with french fries. You ordered Fries and you received a Large unless you said specifically you wanted a different size. You ordered a sandwich and didn't specify the dressings on the sandwich? We asked one time "with everything?" and if you said yes, by god you got everything, including anything and everything we charged extra for like bacon, cheese, etc. My standard direction to all of my folks was that if anyone ever complained you automatically refunded the cash difference between the product they said they wanted and the one they received, said you were sorry, and smiled and handed them a refund right away. No big deal. I got to keep the sale that was rung into the register, you maybe got 15 or 20 cents returned to you, you kept the large fry and everybody was happy. I didn't have a delete sale, I knew where the 20 cents short on the register went and I could care less. Every cashier had the authority to make customers happy if they complained. No big deal, nobody ever really was upset, and because they got to keep the larger product, and guess what they ordered the next time they came in? We won the sales contests they had almost every time they had one.

Even that got boring after a while.

One time they decided to have a "1/2 platter contest" using a special key they had set up called a "1/2 platter". The idea was to ring sales of platters on that month on the 1/2 platter key to track who could upsell the most baked beans side orders. They had it figured out so that it was the same as the menu price stated so customers didn't care how it appeared on the check. We won that contest hands down and running away with it every week. The entire length of the contest we kicked everybody's ass in 1/2 platter sales and all it took was an assumption on my part that my customers loved the baked beans. I just had my lead server (or Service Trainer cannot remember what we called them back then), teach everyone a technique called "bean assumption". Someone would say "I would like a Cheeseburger" for example and we would say "What would you like to go with your Baked Beans", the customer would respond with a product most of the time or at least a very high percentage of the time, we would ring it up, they would get sandwich, 2 side orders (one of which just so happened to be my lowest food cost side item), and everybody is happy. Anyone who complained got the same refund treatment, we never deleted or corrected a higher sale and everyone went home with more money in their pocket every day. I had some of the best-paid servers in the business and didn't care that they made more than I made, they worked hard, let them have the money. They were happy, they came to work, the days flew by and guess who got a nice fat bonus check at the end of the quarter for the lowest food cost and etc? Tell me how I cheated anyone?

Hell, the hardest part was trying to explain to my boss why I needed an extra 12-15 cases (about 72-90 each of #10 size cans) of Baked Beans sitting in the middle of my backroom floor because they would not go on the racks or why when they were busy planning this contest I spent a couple of hundred dollars on bean pots and training dishwashers how to clean them without smashing them. For the record, I told him that his other GMs were going to be calling me to borrow them anyway and I wanted to be ready and for some reason, that worked. He knew his other managers would not be ready and to him, I was planning to help him. That actually happened so it all worked out.

None of it ever would have worked without Jackie though.
Thankx Jack!

1. The L.A.P.D. police union has called the mayor of LA Eric Garcetti "unstable" and in need of counseling after he made comments the other day seemingly calling the police department a bunch of "killers" and after he made a statement saying he was going to cut $150 million dollars from the budget of the L.A.P.D. The annual budget of the department is 1.189 Billion dollars and has more than 10,000 sworn officers.
   
   
2. Hulk Hogan has been banned from the AEW wrestling promotion the other day after it was also confirmed that his ex-wife Linda was also banned for making some remark on twitter that was seemingly racist. I'm sure it's just a promotional thing because hell, Hulk isn't really wrestling anymore so there isn't really anything to ban. Last I heard he wasn't looking to join them anyway. Go figure a twit made a bad twitter remark. I'm pretty sure he doesn't give a crap either way.
   
   
3. Russia has spilled 21,000 TONS of diesel fuel causing a 135 square mile oil spill. How many gallons are 21,000 TONS of fuel anyhow? Ask Alexa she probably knows.
   
   6,000 Tons of fuel was spilled on the ground after the permafrost melted and collapsed the tank, and another 15,000 Tons of fuel leaked into the Ambarnaya and Daldykan rivers and virtually all of their tributaries. Tons is a weird way to describe it though huh?
   
   
4. Ooops!! The unemployment numbers released for May were wrong although they really don't know exactly by how much. They apparently had a misclassification error or some such explanation. Sadly the numbers were worse, not better, and the unemployment level is still high as all get out, over 16% oopsie!
   
   
5. Peyton Manning has said that he came up with the word "Omaha", that he used to say so much while under center because it was the name of his stuffed Giraffe he had as a child. Apparently, he still has it.
   
   Whaddayaknowaboutthat?
   BigMike