Cafe Yumm'd

Quick, off cycle post today, prompted by the passage of the $1.9T economic assistance law the other day.

Lay-off or Furlough

Last Spring, as CoViD-19 was really picking up steam, my son T's former employer, like so many, shut down operations as directed by the state to help contain the spread. Since there was considerable focus by the news media on what was happening, many employers did not just flat-out lay off folks. Laying people off during a rapidly spreading pandemic would not look good. So, for public-relations reasons, a furlough (not fired, but eligible for unemployment) saved many companies from closing their doors forever. But a furlough is not free for the employer. A portion of the unemployment benefit received by the employee is underwritten by the employer, just as if the employee had been laid off. The big difference is that once the employer lays you off, they no longer have any control over your unemployment status. With a furlough, they do: you still technically work for them. This may be what makes a furlough less of a political black-eye for employers than lay-offs, but, for many employees, it doesn't seem any different.

Funny Furlough

So, how can a company with questionable ethics effectively reduce their unemployment costs while also avoiding a public relations issue? Well, they can't lay you off: like we just established, the company will definitely have to pay a portion of those benefits. Back in Spring 2020, most of us did not necessarily know the economic impact would last this long, but many experts were saying it would be 2022 before things were normal, and they were saying that in June 2020. So, paying unemployment benefits on your employees for 2 years, especially for an employer, say.. like Cafe Yumm... who has an employee retention in the less-than-6-months range, is highly unattractive.

So, how do you get people off your unemployment bill? The ethical thing would be to help your employees find other work. Were there many same-role jobs for Cafe Yumm workers at that time? Maybe not, but as fast food was closing down, grocery stores were grossly under-staffed for the surge in shoppers; shoppers who usually dined-out most meals. Grocery stores were so desperate for workers there were ads on the radio and my neighbor (who works at Safeway) stopped me on my driveway to ask if any of our kids wanted to work at Safeway. The Cafe Yumm's of the world could have easily coordinated with the local Safeway, Ralph's, etc. to help their furloughed employees find employment. Delivery business was also booming, so some kind of partnership with UPS or FedEx could have been figured out.

Cafe Yumm'd

Cafe Yumm, however, did not do any of that. Cafe Yumm did not try to help their employees find work at all. Instead, they looked for ways to trick their employees into accidentally quitting. How do you accidentally quit? Well, Cafe Yumm management required all employees to have a region-wide chat-stream active on their phones. These chats had 50 or more people on them, and an individual employee's phone would blow up with hundreds of text messages a day. Buried within this company-mandated spam would be a single notification about a mandatory meeting where attendance would be taken. If you chose not to attend, the company would accept that as your resignation.

That's right. First, they require you to accept hundreds of texts, rendering your phone into a useless noise-maker. Then, they bury an employment ultimatum within the messages, which many employees missed within the sheer volume of messages. By missing that call, your unemployment status is changed: you lose your weekly payment. Your access to the expanded dollars due to CoViD are jeopardized; in T's case they were lost. Suddenly, you, and many like you are without the unemployment safety net during a period when millions, literally 10's of millions, of people are out of work. Heartless doesn't begin to describe this Ebenezer Scrooge action by Cafe Yumm. Other companies have probably pulled this maneuver; I only know of Cafe Yumm because my son got screwed this way. I imagine there are many similar accidental-quit stories out there.

Vote with Your Wallet, Vote with Your Feet

I absolutely bring all this up partly to bring attention to Cafe Yumm, but also to highlight the power we all have when we vote with our wallets and our feet. The pandemic has given us all an opportunity to see how our friends, neighbors and local businesses behave under considerable stress. Cafe Yumm failed miserably, and I will not patronize Cafe Yumm again. I encourage you to look elsewhere for your "healthy" (honestly, not-healthy) fast food as well. 

Some of my favorite local one-off restaurants managed to not only stay open, but find new streams for their order-out business (GrubHub, DoorDash, etc.) so they have about the same staffing levels they had pre-pandemic. The dishwasher may not work as much, and the wait staff are now just doing kitchen-to-driver expo, but with the increased volume of food moving through, they are making it. I have genuine conversations with my friends there, and to a person, they are all doing "okay". Not great, but surviving. I am sure they will appreciate the government check to help ease some of the stress from the smaller-than-preCoViD paycheck to smaller-than-preCoViD paycheck barely-makin-it living.

As for T, he got hired onto a fire crew a few months after he got Cafe Yumm'd. He had to couch-surf along the way to eliminate expenses he no longer could afford (like rent, power, and internet), but he came out on the other side. And, he helped contain one of the worst fire seasons Oregon has ever seen.

Back to the normal posts on Tuesday. Thanks for following along-