I was just getting a coffee and a snack at
La Boulange which is a small chain of French-style bakery and breakfast places here in SF. They have 4-5 of them in the city.
I paid with a crisp twenty I had just gotten from the ATM. When I handed over the bill, the woman at the counter glared at it, then held it up to the light to locate the all-important metal strip inside the bill, then swiped it with one of those pens who's ink turns dark only on a fake bill but remains transparent on a genuine note.
"What's with all the security?" I asked her.
"Well," she said, "there have been a lot of fake twenties getting passed in this neighborhood recently. They said if we take a fake twenty, it will get taken out of our tips!"
So, essentially, lazy and irresponsible management (and probably more accurately, middle management: this is going to be the kind of place which has a "store manager" who makes about 15% more than the counter people or gets a token revenue share if they "hit their targets for the quarter"), but management none the less at these stores has placed anti-counterfeiting responsibility on their counter staff! Think about this for a second.
Can you imagine a crazier thing to do? Should twelve or fifteen dollars per hour cover anti-counterfeiting efforts? Is there a commensurate bonus associated with rejecting a fake bill? Of course there isn't. There is only the fear of penalty and a refusal to take responsibility at the appropriate level in the company for a problem like this.
Now, endowing this woman at the counter with that kind of fear and responsibility passes directly and instantly to me, a sleepy customer who has already gotten over the hump and been impressed enough with them to want to pay six dollars for a coffee and croissant. A basic bad management decision created a bad experience for me first thing in the morning, and caused me to think about their brand as jerky corporate types rather than people capable of making a three dollar plain croissant. It was also the first story I told my co-workers and now La Boulange is banned for all of us.
I wonder, what happens when this woman does encounter a fake bill? She's very motivated to keep her tips and so refuses to take the bill and give the person whatever it is they have ordered. There may already be a coffee poured for the person, a morning bun in the warmer for them. What now? Would this situation potentially mean danger for the stalwart counter person? A scene in the restaurant? Food waste at the very least? Does possession of a fake twenty even imply knowledge of it? Might the person passing the fake just be a guy from the shoe store up the street who was handed it as change for the fifty dollar bill his Aunt gave him for his 23rd birthday? Has the person who handed down the "take a fake twenty and I'll take your tips" rule thought any of this though? You bet they haven't. My guess is that that person's manager handed down a similar decree of punishment that morning at a special magers meeting. How come the tip-stealing threat is a good motivator in the first place? My guess would be that the base wage is such that getting an extra twenty dollars per shift from the tip jar actually matters a lot. Again, this is indicative to me of bad management at several basic levels.
Okay, got it, enough! Why am I belaboring this? I'm not just having a grumpy morning. I think this is a living example of an attitude which has become the norm in big business in the U.S. and has started to infect small business more and more. This is a great example of the fundamental Toxicity of Bad Management. When a real and basic problem comes up for an organization, management hands responsibility for the fix down to the lowest level it can and in a lot of cases sets up an enforcement mechanism based on financial penalty. This is a kind of "anti-bonus" mentality and thinking about it now probably isn't even legal without a very permissive contract structure with your employees. Whatever the case, at the very least this is definitive Bad Business and has been a mounting problem in this country's business culture for decades now. This same attitude, writ much larger, is a core component of our current economic mess. Bad management is always toxic, and not just in the scope of a single transaction or the company at the mercy of it.
The picture at the top is from a former local of mine down in LA. It's a similar deal, but in this case they have taken the additionally insane step of making it their customer's responsibility to manage their employee's schedules. See if you can guess where the $15 will come from?
I had the strange good fortune to get my paws on one of Sony Ericcson's new phones, the "Pureness" last week. In addition to igniting some pretty serious reactions in all different directions form my more design-minded friends just from an industrial design perspective, I have to say it's been a little study in the value of simplicity for me.
