The province of Nova Scotia is in the process of increasing the minimum wage to something like ten dollars per hour or something like that.
One of the government's reasons for doing this is that it will match inflation rates. Which means that, as prices rise with inflation, the minimum wage rises so that stuff doesn't become unaffordable.
The main problem with this is that most people make their money by making and selling stuff. So with an increased minimum wage, it's now more expensive to make stuff. To offset this, company owners will either increase the price of their stuff or lay off lots of their employees. And the cycle begins again.
What causes inflation anyway? The simple answer is this: as the amount of money in circulation increases, prices increase accordingly. Deflation occurs when the amount of money in circulation decreases and prices decrease.
So, throwing more money into the mix is not going to fix the real problem of inflation. Inflation is a problem because it raises the price of stuff beyond it's actual worth into an area called "perceived worth," which is the amount of money people are willing to pay for it. The actual worth of stuff can be calculated by how much it costs to make it and then you can increase that number by as much as seven or eight million percent to make a profit. For example, at Little Caesar's Pizza(tm), it costs an estimated average of $0.18 to produce one bag of Crazy Bread (tm). The same Crazy Bread is then sold for $2.99 resulting in a profit of $2.81 per bag. (Cut that it half on Fridays and Wednesday.)
In actuality, the problem isn't inflation, it's the amount of money in circulation. And when you consider that as much as 75% of the money in circulation is actually artificial money--ie. Credit the problem of inflation becomes a little more understandable.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Survey finds passengers call airline service 'dismal' -- No Kidding.
So I was reading the news today and came across the titled article. Here's a quote from it:
"Passengers are more dissatisfied with airlines' customer service than they have been in years at a time when carriers are charging more and more for tickets and services.
Do you want to know where your customer service is going? How well do you think these airlines treat their employees?
I worked in two different grocery stores and one pizza joint, so I'm kind of acquainted with the customer service industry. The one rule in customer service is this: treat your customers well and they'll come back.
But what's happening more and more is that the owners, always desperate for more money--it seems the more money they make, the more they want--are cutting their spending all over the place. When I worked at the Superstore, they were cutting labour hours drastically, including cashiers, to increase their earnings. If there's one thing you don't do at a grocery store, it's cut your cashier hours.
What resulted, as we expected, was less cashiers working during peak times, resulting in huge long lineups of customers at every cash. We found that more and more customers were leaving their groceries in their carts, at the checkout, and heading to other grocery stores. Do you think those customers will come back? Not to do their major groceries, they won't. Maybe to pick up bread and milk on the way home, if at all. Add to that the cost in labour of putting their unpurchased groceries back on the shelves and the cost of spoiled meat and dairy items being left in the cart too long while they wait (usually 12 hours to two days) for someone to put them away.
The bottom line is, if you want to keep your customers and have record setting customer service, treat your employees well and they will treat your customers well. If you have cranky employees who hate their jobs because they're being forced to do more and more work for less and less money (they get less hours per week--thus less money--and when they do work, they have to work harder because there are fewer people working) they aren't going to be very nice to their customers.
I've worked some places where the employees actually hate the customers. Granted, this is sometimes because the employees have personal problems, but often it's because they have more and more work piling up on them while more customers only mean more work.
"Passengers are more dissatisfied with airlines' customer service than they have been in years at a time when carriers are charging more and more for tickets and services.
"An annual survey being released Tuesday by the University of Michigan found customers giving airlines the worst grades since 2001, with the industry's overall scores dropping for the third straight year."
It's no secret that airline companies are scrambling for money. Ticket prices are increasing, major airlines are going under, other airlines are merging. They're all tightening the belt to save or make more money.Do you want to know where your customer service is going? How well do you think these airlines treat their employees?
I worked in two different grocery stores and one pizza joint, so I'm kind of acquainted with the customer service industry. The one rule in customer service is this: treat your customers well and they'll come back.
But what's happening more and more is that the owners, always desperate for more money--it seems the more money they make, the more they want--are cutting their spending all over the place. When I worked at the Superstore, they were cutting labour hours drastically, including cashiers, to increase their earnings. If there's one thing you don't do at a grocery store, it's cut your cashier hours.
What resulted, as we expected, was less cashiers working during peak times, resulting in huge long lineups of customers at every cash. We found that more and more customers were leaving their groceries in their carts, at the checkout, and heading to other grocery stores. Do you think those customers will come back? Not to do their major groceries, they won't. Maybe to pick up bread and milk on the way home, if at all. Add to that the cost in labour of putting their unpurchased groceries back on the shelves and the cost of spoiled meat and dairy items being left in the cart too long while they wait (usually 12 hours to two days) for someone to put them away.
The bottom line is, if you want to keep your customers and have record setting customer service, treat your employees well and they will treat your customers well. If you have cranky employees who hate their jobs because they're being forced to do more and more work for less and less money (they get less hours per week--thus less money--and when they do work, they have to work harder because there are fewer people working) they aren't going to be very nice to their customers.
I've worked some places where the employees actually hate the customers. Granted, this is sometimes because the employees have personal problems, but often it's because they have more and more work piling up on them while more customers only mean more work.
Monday, May 12, 2008
At Last: All Moved In & Our New Job
So we're finally all moved in to our new apartment.
We got a new job, working for Killam Properties as resident managers and we're one week in. Well, one week and three days, to be exact.
The move was kind of stressful, we packed everything up and moved it one carload at a time over five or six days. Then Joanne and Colin loaned us their van and we moved our couch, bed, and bookshelves. And we bought a new couch from the Brick. It's in our office now, and it's getting lots of use.
We started working at the new job as soon as we moved in. It's great though, there's no commute. We can just hop out of bed, get dressed, and ride the elevator down to the office.
Our co-workers include, Joy, Henry, Lawson, Jane, and Mary-Anne. Joy is our immediate supervisor, she lives just down the hall from our apartment, which is real handy if we have any questions late at night. She's great. She works real hard but she's fun to work with and great to be around. Henry is our sweet little old maintenance man. His office is in the dungeon-parking garage. He fixes everything from plugged sinks to broken toilets. Lawson is the maintenance man for the building next door, but since the two buildings share one office, we get to see him all the time and he's a great help too if we have any questions. Jane is the manager of the building next door (she's Lawson's supervisor) but she mostly does paperwork in the office and since she's mostly always in the office, she's also the unofficial receptionist. Mary-Anne is everyone's boss. She's a great boss though, I mean, she's got a no-nonsense personality and high standards but she's also really nice and compassionate.
Anyway, our job is something like this: we start at eight o'clock and ride the elevator down to the office. Someone is always there before us with coffee from Tim Horton's across the street. Joy pays her kids to fetch the coffee on their way to school. If Mary-Anne is away (at a meeting or running late) we hang around the office for about twenty minutes or half an hour, drink coffee, and talk about the day and night before or whatever, just to get all caught up. If Mary-Anne is there, she doesn't like us hanging around the office, so we either hang out on the smoking dock while Joy and Jane and Lawson smoke or we get right to work.
The first thing we do is sweep and mop the lobby and all the elevators and in front of all the elevators on every floor, and the laundry room. This takes about an hour and a half or two hours. When Janelle and I do it together it takes less time and that always surprises Joy. We also check the hallways for garbage and the garbage chutes for any garbage or recyclables that haven't been properly disposed of. We store any glass or plastic bottles in the electrical rooms on every floor and every once in a while Henry will come by with a shopping cart and collect them all. Then they go down to the bottling room in the dungeon and when we have spare time we sort them into blue bags and once a month they get taken to the bottling place where we get the deposits back. And we have to check some of the gauges in the boiler room, to make sure everything is going okay. In the boiler room there's also a door that leads onto the roof, and I always like to stand on the roof and let the cool salty wind blow me around for a bit while I look out over the harbour and the city.
After the sweeping and mopping are done we check in at the office again to see what needs to be done, or if it's obvious we just do it. Last Monday they told me to sweep the parking garage. Just like that. So I hunted all over the building for one of those long brooms (that took about half an hour--but that's okay because I'm not getting paid by the hour) and I started sweeping up the dirt and the dust and the garbage in the parking garage. I had a nice big pile of dirt accumulated after about an hour and a half and I was calculating that the job would probably take me the rest of the day. It was hard work too, and I was covered in sweat and all the dirt that was flying up from my sweeping was sticking to me so I was really dirty, like an eighteenth century chimney sweeper from a Charles Dickens' novel. That's when Henry walked by and saw what I was doing. He started laughing and said, "Contrary to what they told you, you don't have to do that."
Then he explained that I don't have to sweep the whole garage, I just have to go through it and sweep up all the garbage, like little pieces of paper or broken bottles and things like that--anything that looks like it doesn't belong in a parking garage. So, after that it only took me until half an hour after lunch. Yeah, we get a one hour lunch from twelve to one. We usually go back up to our apartment for soup or sandwiches. I like to stretch out on the couch and take a nap or something. After I finished sweeping the parking garage I swept the stairs and that took me the rest of the day because it's a twelve storey building.
The next day Janelle and I mopped the stairs and it was a bit faster because there were two of us. (Janelle was working at Little Caesar's on Monday.) Aside from that, we vacuum every second week, sweep the back stairs (the tunnel to the Stupid Store) every second day--that only takes about ten minutes though--, and clean up the garbage on the lawn somewhat regularly; like when it looks bad. At four, we go home and have supper. And we're off for the night.
Every second night and every second weekend we're on call. That means one of us has to stay home all the time with the telephone, Killam gave us a cell phone and on the nights that we're on call, we turn on the call forwarding so that anyone calling the office phone will ring on this cell phone. So we deal with all kinds of things at night. Mostly it's the money machine in the laundry room. The paper feeder jams all the time. On Sunday I got called down to fix it four times, and two times on Saturday. Or if anyone gets locked out because they forgot their keys, we let them in. We also have to do the evening checks on the boiler room, and a quick walk through the building to make sure everything is okay and there's no garbage lying around. On Friday and Saturday a security guard comes in at night from ten to five and he deals with all the noise complaints and the people smoking in the lobby or drinking on the front step so that we can get some sleep.
Sometimes homeless people come in and sleep in the stairs. If we find them, we have to kick them out. The socialist in me feels bad about kicking them out, but it's my job and they defecate and urinate in the stairs and we have to clean up after them; we really don't need that. The insane part is that it's the tenants who let them in. If they see them waiting by the door, they hold the door open so the homeless people can come in. That doesn't make sense to me; what's the point of having a security system if you're not going to use it? Before we let anyone in, if they claim that they don't have their keys or got locked out, we need their apartment number or social inurance number and then we double check it in the office. If it doesn't check out, they can't come in. Mind you, if they wait by the door long enough, one of the tenants will let them in. But if they keep hanging around, we're supposed to call the police to have them removed. I'm glad Janelle can put on a pretty stern voice. Anyways, there are places they can go to spend the night but the reason they don't go is because they don't want to give up their booze and drugs.
On our first night on call, we got a call from someone in the laundry room complaining that his laundry had been stolen. So, I went down and double checked. The laundry was really gone. So I called Joy, who happened to be doing her laundry that night too, and she met me in the office where we checked the security cameras. It turned out that someone was helping Joy and she took the laundry from the wrong dryer. We found the missing laundry in Joy's apartment. The next day someone else came by the office with the same complaint and we found his laundry in Joy's apartment too.
It's just a day in the life.
We got a new job, working for Killam Properties as resident managers and we're one week in. Well, one week and three days, to be exact.
The move was kind of stressful, we packed everything up and moved it one carload at a time over five or six days. Then Joanne and Colin loaned us their van and we moved our couch, bed, and bookshelves. And we bought a new couch from the Brick. It's in our office now, and it's getting lots of use.
We started working at the new job as soon as we moved in. It's great though, there's no commute. We can just hop out of bed, get dressed, and ride the elevator down to the office.
Our co-workers include, Joy, Henry, Lawson, Jane, and Mary-Anne. Joy is our immediate supervisor, she lives just down the hall from our apartment, which is real handy if we have any questions late at night. She's great. She works real hard but she's fun to work with and great to be around. Henry is our sweet little old maintenance man. His office is in the dungeon-parking garage. He fixes everything from plugged sinks to broken toilets. Lawson is the maintenance man for the building next door, but since the two buildings share one office, we get to see him all the time and he's a great help too if we have any questions. Jane is the manager of the building next door (she's Lawson's supervisor) but she mostly does paperwork in the office and since she's mostly always in the office, she's also the unofficial receptionist. Mary-Anne is everyone's boss. She's a great boss though, I mean, she's got a no-nonsense personality and high standards but she's also really nice and compassionate.
Anyway, our job is something like this: we start at eight o'clock and ride the elevator down to the office. Someone is always there before us with coffee from Tim Horton's across the street. Joy pays her kids to fetch the coffee on their way to school. If Mary-Anne is away (at a meeting or running late) we hang around the office for about twenty minutes or half an hour, drink coffee, and talk about the day and night before or whatever, just to get all caught up. If Mary-Anne is there, she doesn't like us hanging around the office, so we either hang out on the smoking dock while Joy and Jane and Lawson smoke or we get right to work.
The first thing we do is sweep and mop the lobby and all the elevators and in front of all the elevators on every floor, and the laundry room. This takes about an hour and a half or two hours. When Janelle and I do it together it takes less time and that always surprises Joy. We also check the hallways for garbage and the garbage chutes for any garbage or recyclables that haven't been properly disposed of. We store any glass or plastic bottles in the electrical rooms on every floor and every once in a while Henry will come by with a shopping cart and collect them all. Then they go down to the bottling room in the dungeon and when we have spare time we sort them into blue bags and once a month they get taken to the bottling place where we get the deposits back. And we have to check some of the gauges in the boiler room, to make sure everything is going okay. In the boiler room there's also a door that leads onto the roof, and I always like to stand on the roof and let the cool salty wind blow me around for a bit while I look out over the harbour and the city.
After the sweeping and mopping are done we check in at the office again to see what needs to be done, or if it's obvious we just do it. Last Monday they told me to sweep the parking garage. Just like that. So I hunted all over the building for one of those long brooms (that took about half an hour--but that's okay because I'm not getting paid by the hour) and I started sweeping up the dirt and the dust and the garbage in the parking garage. I had a nice big pile of dirt accumulated after about an hour and a half and I was calculating that the job would probably take me the rest of the day. It was hard work too, and I was covered in sweat and all the dirt that was flying up from my sweeping was sticking to me so I was really dirty, like an eighteenth century chimney sweeper from a Charles Dickens' novel. That's when Henry walked by and saw what I was doing. He started laughing and said, "Contrary to what they told you, you don't have to do that."
Then he explained that I don't have to sweep the whole garage, I just have to go through it and sweep up all the garbage, like little pieces of paper or broken bottles and things like that--anything that looks like it doesn't belong in a parking garage. So, after that it only took me until half an hour after lunch. Yeah, we get a one hour lunch from twelve to one. We usually go back up to our apartment for soup or sandwiches. I like to stretch out on the couch and take a nap or something. After I finished sweeping the parking garage I swept the stairs and that took me the rest of the day because it's a twelve storey building.
The next day Janelle and I mopped the stairs and it was a bit faster because there were two of us. (Janelle was working at Little Caesar's on Monday.) Aside from that, we vacuum every second week, sweep the back stairs (the tunnel to the Stupid Store) every second day--that only takes about ten minutes though--, and clean up the garbage on the lawn somewhat regularly; like when it looks bad. At four, we go home and have supper. And we're off for the night.
Every second night and every second weekend we're on call. That means one of us has to stay home all the time with the telephone, Killam gave us a cell phone and on the nights that we're on call, we turn on the call forwarding so that anyone calling the office phone will ring on this cell phone. So we deal with all kinds of things at night. Mostly it's the money machine in the laundry room. The paper feeder jams all the time. On Sunday I got called down to fix it four times, and two times on Saturday. Or if anyone gets locked out because they forgot their keys, we let them in. We also have to do the evening checks on the boiler room, and a quick walk through the building to make sure everything is okay and there's no garbage lying around. On Friday and Saturday a security guard comes in at night from ten to five and he deals with all the noise complaints and the people smoking in the lobby or drinking on the front step so that we can get some sleep.
Sometimes homeless people come in and sleep in the stairs. If we find them, we have to kick them out. The socialist in me feels bad about kicking them out, but it's my job and they defecate and urinate in the stairs and we have to clean up after them; we really don't need that. The insane part is that it's the tenants who let them in. If they see them waiting by the door, they hold the door open so the homeless people can come in. That doesn't make sense to me; what's the point of having a security system if you're not going to use it? Before we let anyone in, if they claim that they don't have their keys or got locked out, we need their apartment number or social inurance number and then we double check it in the office. If it doesn't check out, they can't come in. Mind you, if they wait by the door long enough, one of the tenants will let them in. But if they keep hanging around, we're supposed to call the police to have them removed. I'm glad Janelle can put on a pretty stern voice. Anyways, there are places they can go to spend the night but the reason they don't go is because they don't want to give up their booze and drugs.
On our first night on call, we got a call from someone in the laundry room complaining that his laundry had been stolen. So, I went down and double checked. The laundry was really gone. So I called Joy, who happened to be doing her laundry that night too, and she met me in the office where we checked the security cameras. It turned out that someone was helping Joy and she took the laundry from the wrong dryer. We found the missing laundry in Joy's apartment. The next day someone else came by the office with the same complaint and we found his laundry in Joy's apartment too.
It's just a day in the life.
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