Pizza Update — Here’s a Dollar, Call Someone Who Cares

As of last night, 8/9/09, my Pizza Hut has officially gone insane.  Some might call this a relapse, since it’s clearly not the first time this has happened.  I mean, this was once the place where Shock Manager prowled the front of the store looking for people to make uncomfortable.  We’ve had intoxicated drivers, intoxicated managers, drug-dealing cooks, and a parade of Managers and Area Managers that got more and more incompetent and power-trippy.  This has left us in quite an odd situation, morale-wise.  As soon as we know what to expect, the rules change, and usually for the worse.  Here are some bullet points that illustrate some of our problems:

• We routinely run out of stuff like boxes and crushed red pepper packets, despite the fact that they don’t spoil.  I’ve had four store managers in my time at this restaurant, and the last three couldn’t seem to figure out how many boxes to order.  Thankfully, the current manager has appeared to figure this one out, at least for now.  But we’ve had to “halve” large pizzas and serve them in two medium boxes at least five times since he’s arrived.  Once is too many.
• Andrea the shift manager happened.  She was from Brazil, and didn’t understand why nobody was following her totally crazy orders.  Her 2-week tenure started badly — she went on and on about how every employee in the store was “immature” and “not team players” because we wouldn’t do her job for her.  Really, that’s all it was about.  I’d explain further, but maybe in a footnote*.  Anyway, her time there ended with her calling the cops on an employee’s mother, after said mother came in the store and yelled at her for yelling at her daughter.  Andrea left in tears, saying she just couldn’t handle our store.  This really happened.
• I think I’ve already written about this, but for two weeks the Area Manager came in and ran the store himself, because he didn’t like the way things were going.  He cut everyone’s hours 40-50%, which ran the store to a grinding halt the next week.  Also, how do you think morale was?  Do you think that a completely unannounced time (and therefore pay) cut for everyone was something that people do, I mean ever?  It was a new one for me.  I had literally had the same 5-night schedule for two years.  Since that week, I haven’t had the same schedule twice.  It’s just amazingly disrespectful.
• Speaking of blatant disrespect, meet our new food policies.  If they seem like the result of a labor negotiation where only one side was allowed to speak, that’s because they are.  These were just unilaterally decided one day, and posted on a dry-erase board in a harsh scrawl.

In exchange for Pizza Hut buying us cheap bottled water we can drink for free (until it runs out),

– Sodas are now full price, and require a receipt on the bottle (they were previously half-price)

– The employee discount goes from 50% to 20%, unless the employee is on a half-hour “break” (which rarely ever happens).

– All mistake pizzas/deliveries that don’t answer the door/breadsticks that need to be thrown out are now contraband and not to be eaten by the employees.  They are put in the freezer for the Harvest Program people to pick up once a week.  If an employee wants some of this food, he/she has to buy it at a 20% discount.  Seriously.

The first two line items make sense, especially when coupled with the water thing.  But why, you might ask, would this Hut break the cardinal rule of restaurants everywhere, namely that one of the perks of working there (perhaps the only perk) is free food?  Here’s my theory:  The last time the Harvest Program people came in to pick up food, we only had three pizzas for them.  They weren’t even real pizzas, either — they were Pizza Mias.  I think this somehow got back to our Area Manager, who called the store manager and told him to “get a handle on this food situation.”  So they put their brains together and crafted a policy that rivals the most insane policies I’ve ever seen in a restaurant.  Must have seemed like a good idea at the time though.

The problem in something a child could see — every time hungry employees watch perfectly good pizzas go past them and into a give-away truck, they can’t help but be insulted.  It’d be one thing if they were just insulting employees once and then moving on, but this is all night every night.  It’s driving people crazy, because what Pizza Hut is basically saying is, “We’re giving this stuff away or throwing it out, but if you want it, you people who made/delivered/prepped it, you’re going to have to pay for it.”    They’re basically saying we’re not worthy of their garbage.

This whole policy came to a head yesterday, as one of our new managers decided that every day is Power Trip day and suspended a driver for a week because he didn’t want to pay to eat cinnamon sticks the store was just going to throw out. That’s right, he suspended the driver for not just throwing the food in the trash.  It’s one thing to have an insane policy, quite another to enforce that insane policy with an insanely heavy hand.  I’ve seen a lot of things in my years as a pizza driver, but this takes the cake, if that cake is frosted with pure insanity.

And so then later in the evening I’m forced to take a delivery way out of the area, and the nice shift manager is planning on giving me extra money for my gas and time.  Power Trip Manager tells her to give me one dollar.  He could have decided on any reasonable dollar amount, but chose one dollar.  Why?  Because he thinks that employees are impossible to piss off, I guess.  It’s a good thing I’m a grown-up chilled-out human being, because otherwise I would have taken that dollar as the slap in the face it was.

The good news?  If I’m annoyed by him, the rest of the employees must be 10 times as annoyed.  This will not end well, peoples.  It never does.

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*Her first night, she’s running the register and I arrive back from a delivery.  Now, her job is to cash out deliveries and carryouts, not just carryouts.  So she helps carryout customer after carryout customer, I mean for like 15 minutes this goes on.  Meanwhile, a line of 7 drivers have formed behind me, and they are getting restless.  So some snide comments are made, and Andrea, having skin made of tissue paper, internalizes them and later accuses us all of being immature and not helping her.  All us drivers were flabbergasted, since she was the one who was failing us.  As this was happening, 20 deliveries sat on the shelf an extra 10-20 minutes because she just wouldn’t cash us out.

This story is a microcosm of her entire 2-week career there.  I have no idea where they find these people.  Anyway, Tia’s mom Tia put and end to her reign of terror practically before it began.  That’s right, Tia’s mom is named Tia.