making it fun
AT THE THIRTY–EIGHTH Annual Multi-Unit Foodserver Operators Conference held a few years ago in Los Angeles, the theme was “People: The Single Point of Difference.” Most of the fourteen hundred attendees were chain restaurant operators and executives. The ballroom at the Century Plaza Hotel was filled with men and women in expensive suits, a well-to-do group whose members looked as though they hadn’t grilled a burger or mopped a floor in a while. The conference workshops had names like “Dual Branding: Case Studies from the Field” and “Segment Marketing: The Right Message for the Right Market” and “In Line and on Target: The Changing Dimensions of Site Selection.” Awards were given for the best radio and television ads. Restaurants were inducted into the Fine Dining Hall of Fame. Chains competed to be named Operator of the Year. Foodservice companies filled a nearby exhibition space with their latest products: dips, toppings, condiments, high-tech ovens, the latest in pest control. The leading topic of conversation at the scheduled workshops, in the hallways and hotel bars, was how to find inexpensive workers in an American economy where unemployment had fallen to a twenty-four-year low.
James C. Doherty, the publisher of Nation’s Restaurant News at the time, gave a speech urging the restaurant industry to move away from relying on a low-wage workforce with high levels of turnover and to promote instead the kind of labor policies that would create long-term careers in foodservice. How can workers look to this industry for a career, he asked, when it pays them the minimum wage and provides them no health benefits? Doherty’s suggestions received polite applause.
The keynote speech was given by David Novak, the president of Tricon Global Restaurants. His company operates more restaurants than any other company in the world — 30,000 Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and KFCs. A former advertising executive with a boyish face and the earnest delivery style of a motivational speaker, Novak charmed the crowd. He talked about the sort of recognition his company tried to give its employees, the pep talks, the prizes, the special awards of plastic chili peppers and rubber chickens. He believed the best way to motivate people is to have fun. “Cynics need to be in some other industry,” he said. Employee awards created a sense of pride and esteem, they showed that management was watching, and they did not cost a lot of money. “We want to be a great company for the people who make it great,” Novak announced. Other speakers talked about teamwork, empowering workers, and making it “fun.”
During the President’s Panel, the real sentiments of the assembled restaurant operators and executives became clear. Norman Brinker — a legend in the industry, the founder of Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale, the current owner of Chili’s, a major donor to the Republican Party — spoke to the conference in language that was simple, direct, and free of platitudes. “I see the possibility of unions,” he warned. The thought “chilled” him. He asked everyone in the audience to give more money to the industry’s key lobbying groups. “And [Senator] Kennedy’s pushing hard on a $7.25 minimum wage,” he continued. “That’ll be fun, won’t it? I love the idea of that. I sure do — strike me dead!” As the crowd laughed and roared and applauded Brinker’s call to arms against unions and the government, the talk about teamwork fell into the proper perspective.
4/success
MATTHEW KABONG glides his ’83 Buick LeSabre through the streets of Pueblo, Colorado, at night, looking for a trailer park called Meadowbrook. Two Little Caesars pizzas and a bag of Crazy Bread sit in the back seat. “Welcome to my office,” he says, reaching down, turning up the radio, playing some mellow rhythm and blues. Kabong was born in Nigeria and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He studies electrical engineering at a local college, hopes to own a Radio Shack some day, and delivers pizzas for Little Caesars four or five nights a week. He earns the minimum wage, plus a dollar for each delivery, plus tips. On a good night he makes about fifty bucks. We cruise past block after block of humble little houses, whitewashed and stucco, built decades ago, with pickup trucks in the driveways and children’s toys on the lawns. Pueblo is the southernmost city along the Front Range, forty miles from Colorado Springs, but for generations a world apart, largely working class and Latino, a town with steel mills that was never hip like Boulder, bustling like Denver, or aristocratic like Colorado Springs. Nobody ever built a polo field in Pueblo, and snobs up north still call it “the asshole of Colorado.”
We turn a corner and find Meadowbrook. All the trailers look the same, slightly ragged around the edges, lined up in neat rows. Kabong parks the car, and when the radio and the headlights shut off, the street suddenly feels empty and dark. Then somewhere a dog barks, the door of a nearby trailer opens, and light spills onto the gravel driveway. A little white girl with blonde hair, about seven years old, smiles at this big Nigerian bringing pizza, hands him fifteen dollars, takes the food, and tells him to keep the change. Behind her there’s movement in the trailer, a brief glimpse of someone else’s life, a tidy kitchen, the flickering shadows of a TV. The door closes, and Kabong heads back to the Buick, his office, beneath a huge sky full of stars. He has a $1.76 tip in his pocket, the biggest tip so far tonight.
The wide gulf between Colorado Springs and Pueblo — a long-standing social, cultural, political, and economic division — is starting to narrow. As you drive through the streets of Pueblo, you can feel the change coming, something palpable in the air. During the 1980s, the city’s unemployment rate hovered at about 12 percent, and not much was built. New things now seem to appear every month, new roads around the Pueblo Mall, new movie theaters, a new Applebee’s, an Olive Garden, a Home Depot, a great big Marriott. Subdivisions are creeping south from Colorado Springs along I-25, turning cattle ranches into street after street of ranch-style homes. Pueblo has not boomed yet; it seems ready, right on the verge, about to become more like the rest.
The Little Caesars where Kabong works is in the Belmont section of town, across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts, not far from the University of Southern Colorado campus. The small square building the Little Caesars occupies used to house a Godfather’s Pizza and before that, a Dairy Bar. The restaurant has half a dozen brown Formica tables, red brick walls, a gumball machine near the counter, white-and-brown flecked linoleum floors. The place is clean but has not been redecorated for a while. The customers who drop by or call for pizza are college students, ordinary working people, people with large families, and the poor. Little Caesars pizzas are big and inexpensive, often providing enough food for more than one meal.