Corporate Ameri-DUHHHHH

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to put the kids to bed and make sure your parents hearing aids are turned down, because I am about to go off!  Believe it or not, this blog thing is not how I make my living.  No, I get to deal with a Fortune 500 company on a daily basis by supplying a service to them.  For many years it was a great relationship.  We took care of them at a very reasonable price and they paid in a timely manner.  All that has changed as of late and really it's just a microcosm of Corporate America.  A bunch of people sit in a room staring at numbers decide that they are paying everyone too much.  Everybody from the executive assistant all the way down to the janitor.  Of course you notice that it does not continue on up the food chain to include the people that really should have some of their fat cut.  No, the executives all make sure they get theirs.  Afterall, they are the ones that figured out how to screw everyone and ended up with piles of money that they do not know what to do with.  May as well divvy it out amongst themselves in bonus form.

Yes, it's been interesting watching this particular company slash their own throats in the name of short term gains.  They continue to cut payroll budgets so that there is no one in their store to wait on their customers.  They shortened their store hours in some cases so you go there to make a late night run to pick up something you need and find out the store is closed.  You ask to talk to a manager and you get some pimply faced kid that doesn't have a clue about anything that is not related to the video games he plays in his mother's basement, yet he acts like he knows it all.

The company does this all so it can increase it's earnings, not looking at any of the long term consequences of their actions.  It does not matter, because whoever is running the company today will most likely be working for a completely different company once the consequences come to fruition.  They will have moved on to the next company to rape and pillage after having made their millions and boosted their career by "turning around" a beleaguered Fortune 500 company.  When the poo hits the turbine it will not look like it was their fault, it was whoever was manning the helm when the poo went "WHOP!!".  That is the way Corporate America operates.  CEOs, CFOs, COOs and the like move from one gig to another trying to drum up short term earnings so they can cash their million dollar checks.  They continue to screw over all the hard working people that actually do the work that makes the company it's money.  In my mind Corporate America is trying to reinstitute slavery in America.  Now, I am sure that NAACP just gasped, but hear me out.  I am not saying that what corporations are doing today is as bad as what African Americans had to endure.  Not by a long shot.  But what made a lot of people rich back in the infancy of the United States is the fact that they had relatively free labor.  Yes they had to house and feed their slaves, but that was way cheaper that having to actually pay someone to do their work.  That's how Thomas Jefferson made his fortune and there were hundreds if not thousands of others that did the same thing and got rich doing it.  Today, Corporate America has made sure that nobody is able to make a comfortable living, except for the company big wigs of course.  To me, this is a form of slavery.  This time though, it isn't a race of people being used as slaves, it's a class of people, but hey, it's just business, it's nothing personal.  That's what they tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

So, getting back to my story, at one time this was a great company to be involved with.  But a bunch of people in suits staring at numbers saw a number they did not like.  Without doing any research and figuring out if it was a reasonable number or not, they just made a decision that the number had to be lowered.  Keep in mind this is a number that the local stores have been trying to get lowered for years, but they took bid after bid after bid and could never find anything lower.  Or at least a lower bid from people with all their teeth and without a criminal record.  However, the suits, they knew better, there had to be a way to force their hand.  So, they just said, this is how much we will pay you, take it or leave it.  This was several years ago when everyone was wondering if the bottom was going to fall out of the financial system, so work was hard to come by.  We chose to stick with it and try to figure out a way to make it work.  Now that our contract is almost up, we are hearing that once again they are going to try and make us take another pay cut.  Let's just say I've been exfoliating my backside and applying ample amounts of moisturizer to said area in anticipation of the lips that will soon be puckering up to kiss my fat, hairy, soft and supple A**!!!!

Pucker up buttercup!