There are some awesome things about where I work...
Nothing is more awesome than working at a store surrounded by vegetables all day. Fresh produce has to be delivered and chopped frequently. This morning, a very rushed deliveryman ran into the store as I was cleaning counters and dropped a bag of onions and cucumbers in my arms (yes, OW) and said, "thank you thank you, have a nice day," before quickly leaving. I just can't get over how awesome it feels to just get to work with fresh vegetables all day and have random things like that happen.
But there are some annoying parts about it...
Today the whole team was in early working on a truly epic catering order. We filled an entire car with a huuuuuuge catering order that was big enough to offset our weekly shipment so we'd have enough stuff for it. But anyway, we got a 70 dollar tip on the receipt they signed for us. The owner brings back the receipt and pulls 70 out of the register. He gives me 10. I'm like "lol what's this for" and he's like "oh that's the tip for the jar." Our jar is split up every week evenly between our employees. Like most franchises, we only accepts cash tips except on deliveries (which is really just compensating us for the delivery since there is no delivery charge), so it's really quite pitiful at times, yet it's enough to get by and we've really made it great... but not when our boss pockets 60 dollars.
When I think about business, I think about my tip jar...
The better we do, the happier the customers are, the more tips we get. The same is true for our total sales, but the tips are the portion I have control over. I take the tips and split it among the 5 of us evenly except on rare occasions of sickness or low hours where I'll pro-rate someone. If I ever own a place, I kinda foresee running it like that entirely. Let's say we are doing decently and we are having basic $1500 days (which is about as low as it gets for our low-end estimate). We work 5 days a week for 4 hours (excluding open/close) and we'll assume 4 weeks in the month. So we'll make roughly 5*4*1500=30000 dollars a month. Rent/utils is probably a good $10,000 a month? I have NO idea, but we are in the financial district, so wtf we'll estimate. We order food from a special place with bulk prices. Each shipment is about $1300 and we do about one of those a week. Contents vary a lot due to catering needs, but in all seriousness it doesn't NEED to be that high-- we keep getting shit we don't need and not enough shit we do need. Let's also set aside $2000 dollars a month to fix shit. Emergency UPS order, fridge needs to be checked out by a pro, broken printer, normal shit like that. So we're at less than two thirds of our revenue even in this low estimate and let's actually round it up to that and assume we are spending $20000 to run the business. Now we get to paying our employees. Let's say there are 5 employees and myself (imaginary owner). $10000 split 6 ways is roughly $1600 a month. But to be fair, of the 5 employees, 2 of them work like 3 hours a day. So maybe instead we should take that money and split it evenly among each hour. Work an hour, get one share of the pie, etc. So 3 employees work 30 hours per week and 2 employees work like 20 (high estimate again as one does in fact work 10 hours a week) and then there is me and I'll say I work 40 because I fuckin own the place and do everything behind the scenes. 40+30*4+20*4=240 hours total to split the 10,000 into making each hour of work equal to 41 dollars an hour. That seems awesome, but let's say I'm an UBER dick and decide to say I work 24 hours a day. Same calculation with my new "back breaking hours" (probably less than my employees) yields hourly wage for all employees is roughly 20 dollars an hour and my monthly salary would be $9600 or 115k a year... Oh yeah, and that's like the lowest possible estimate of our wage. On great days, we rock nearly $3000 dollars, I doubt our rent is seriously 10k, and we probably didn't really need to round up our operation costs from $17,200 to $20,000. ---Oh yeah, and we'd still have a tip jar. And I can betcha we'd earn more tips (that I wouldn't take 60 of the 70 of) if we ran the business that way.
Would it work? Would people buy into working for me when I'd tell them upright that our wages would be dependent on how well we work as a business and really let them in on how well we were doing?
No comments:
Post a Comment