Search This Blog

Pageviews past week

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The BUCK Starts Here By Chuck McGlawn

Let us you and I have a mind experiment. You got this buck and you want a candy bar. Your local Walgreens sells Super Snickers for a buck. You go there and buy one, and then proceed to eat and enjoy it. That buck that you spent has a huge job ahead of it. Some of that buck goes to pay the rent on Walgreens' location. Some of it goes to pay the insurance the store must carry. Some of it goes to the utility companies for power to light the store. Some must go to the maintenance crew for store clean up. Some of that buck must go trash removal. Of course, some must go to the clerk, his supervisor, his manager and the District Manager. In addition, do not forget some must go for sales tax.

That list could go on for pages and pages before you ever get to the Mars Candy company that made the Super Snickers that you bought. Mars then would have additional pages and pages of things they must pay for like rent, insurance, utilities, employees, excreta, excreta, excreta, excreta, excreta. Did I mention excreta?  In addition, they must also buy chocolate, peanuts and caramel with whatever part of your buck that they got.

I am sure that if you could list everyone that benefited by getting some part of your buck it would take a thousand volumes of a thousand printed pages each just to list them. You are feeling important, right.

In this thought experiment let, us give Mars Candy two factories one in Illinois and one in Mississippi. And Mississippi has just passed an immigration friendly law, allowing an additional one thousand guest workers, and some go to work for Mars doing clean-up and janitorial work. Mars learns that these younger more energetic workers can get the jobs done with a 20% decrease in janitorial staff.

Instead of just cutting the janitorial staff, the plant takes the best of the 20% and places them around the plant in other jobs. This gives Mars the ability to do something they have wanted to try. They take the best from various divisions of the plant and they create an efficiency staff. This group gets a pay increase and they roam the plant looking for waste in production. This plan works very well, and efficiency improves.

The Company Management finds things going well and hire or train some bilingual supervisors. More guest workers are employed. Both production and profits are up.

You, unaware of all of this interaction, get an attack of the “sweet tooth”; you grab your buck and head to the Walgreens, where you find you are able to buy your Super Snickers for just fifty cents. On your way to your car, you find a vending machine and you buy a soft drink for that “Half Dollar”. And back in California Chuck McGlawn starts a new article entitled, “The Half Dollar Starts Here”

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Mars learns that these younger more energetic workers can get the jobs done with a 20% decrease in janitorial staff"

Using your logic, companies should fire all workers in manual labor jobs not requiring an education over 45 years old and recruit young high school grads to replace them. Using your logic then Mars could sell their Super Snickers for $0.25. Naturally that would put the older people in the unemployment line collecting state benefits and leave them without work - but what the hell? We'd have cheap candy bars!!!

"This gives Mars the ability to do something they have wanted to try. They take the best from various divisions of the plant and they create an efficiency staff. This group gets a pay increase and they roam the plant looking for waste in production. This plan works very well, and efficiency improves"

But Mars, like all big companies, already has a 'Quality Control' Department that is staffed to capacity. Plus, the economy is slow and candy bars are not selling like they used to. Mars is laying people off to control costs and cannot create new departments to accomodate the hiring of immigrants. Companies in the real world just don't work that way. It's unrealistic to think they do.

"The Company Management finds things going well and hire or train some bilingual supervisors. More guest workers are employed. Both production and profits are up"

Again, using your logic Mars should send a transport ship to Africa or India and load it up with indigent foreigners and bring them back to work in their factories. Using your logic such a method would make Mars the most profitable company on Planet Earth!!! That way they could sell their Snickers Super Bar for a thin dime and have factories in every state of the union. That is, if we were to use your logic. :>)

chuckest said...

I didn't think you would get it.

Anonymous said...

Mr. McGlawn said:

"I didn't think you would get it"

Oh yes. I get it all too well. I suspect that you don't have much experience in the business world or truly understand how it works.

First off, we have ample younger workers here in America to take vacant janitorial jobs. We don't need foreign labor to do those jobs.

I think your main point (that you didn't mention) was that Mars could hire the immigrants at a slave wage with no benefits. That way they could also apply for food stamps and get free medical care (compliments of the taxpayer) at their local hospital ER. And, naturally, they could live 3 families to a single story home creating blight and lowering property values for all their neighbors.

We don't have enough jobs in America for Americans today, Mr. McGlawn. How could we possibly accomodate a workforce from indigent foreign nations? Have you read the news lately? Americans are struggling to survive. Why are you so interested in pleasing foreigners when your own countrymen suffer???

Your simplistic examples are amusing. You always fail to mention the consequences that would go along with your fairy tale scenarios. I guess you leave that for your audience to reveal.