Reality bites Seattle in the ass

As restaurants start shutting down in advance of the $15 minimum wage.

For those who haven't worked in food service at all, lemme lay down a little knowledge for you.  In a restaurant, a 3% profit margin is GOOD.  If you start making a 5% profit margin, you might get audited because that's rather rare.

Now increase your personnel costs by 50%.  Guess what happens?  Your profit margins go into the negatives, and a negative profit margin means shutting down.  It's no surprise that restaurant owners are choosing to shut down now, rather than when they're thousands of dollars in the red.  They can see what's coming.

And while people look at the map and think the entire area around the Puget Sound is "Seattle", the truth is that there are plenty of other towns and cities all around Seattle that don't have to suffer under the kind of idiocy that Seattle does.  And guess where those businesses are going to go?

Of course, they might not go anywhere at all.  They might just leave permanently and decide that they no longer want to do business in an area run by greedy socialists who have no clue how an economy works.  That's what I would do, after all.  And I guarantee you that I'm not going to do a single bit of business within Seattle boundaries if I can help it, because the cost on me is going to skyrocket.  Why should I waste my money in Seattle when I can go thirty miles and do business in a sane area for much less cost?

The one good thing to come out of this is that people all over the country can point at Seattle and say "Well, there's the end result of what you want to do, and I for one refuse to allow you to do that to my town."

Bottling

Helped a friend bottle up four cases of a hibiscus mead tonight.

There will come a day when I'm retired and in my forever home, and I'm going to make damn sure that the set-up I have will allow me to bottle four cases with ease.  Because dammit, this doing everything by hand is for the birds.  But I'm not going to set up a bottling line just to tear it down every three years and move it.

Two cops were shot in Ferguson, MO

I wish the cops would just walk away, and not come back to their jobs the next day.  

They won't do that, of course.  But I wish they would.

How many times have people said that the cops are essentially an extension of the public's will?  If the public doesn't want them there, then they should leave.

Just walk away.

I figure that would last about a week before the National Guard is called in to police the wreckage of what used to be a city.  For all the hell that people have thrown at the police in Ferguson, they're the first one to get blamed if anything goes wrong, while all the supporters of Michael Brown, the dope-smoking thug who roughed up a store owner and then assaulted a cop, continue to spew their lies and incite violence without any repercussions.

Screw.  That.

I'd just walk away and let the animals destroy their town.  

Leadership

One of the essences of leadership is the ability to see what talents your people have, and then put them to the best use.

The antithesis of this is saying "Oh, well you're just a ______, so you can't do that.  You can only do this."

Folks, if you have a person who's an introvert, putting them into a job that requires talking to people every single day is going to wring them out.

Likewise, if you have someone who can talk to almost anybody and who enjoys interacting with people, putting them behind a keyboard and telling them that their job is to do the typing and nothing else, they are going to hate their job from the word go.

You figure out what your people can do, and then do your best to lay out plans and procedures that let your people work for you to accomplish the mission.

One day soon, I'll be in a unit with Leadership.

Dealing with some curveballs

And a few knuckleballs that life keeps throwing at me.  Blogging may be light for a bit.

Dear Planet Fitness

When you decide to cozy up to sexual aberrant people rather than the vast majority of your customer base, you no longer deserve to have a customer base.

Here's the man who wants to change in the women's restroom.  Take a gander.  Feel the insanity.

I don't think any woman should be forced to be in the same room with that male.  Period.