As the tagline for my blog used to say “sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute”. I actually did get a bit of sleep last night. About normal for me anyway. I finally hit the sack about 10:30 and have been up for almost 30 minutes now. Working on my second cup of coffee. The nice thing is that with all of the managers in I won’t drag in until about a quarter till seven today. I have a few things I need to do and I will end up cooking at that same store for awhile this morning. That is my most challenging one as well. It’s the one where they had that guy arrested for having hidden cameras, so right off the bat I have a public perception problem that is still there several months after the fact. It’s in a pretty upscale neighborhood which makes it a little harder to get my business back as well.
Couple that with the fact that half that guy’s employees were either using or selling drugs on the premises and I pretty much have an uphill battle there. My sales are down something like 28% over this time last year.
The guy that IS there managing now is a pretty good manager. I trained him a couple of years ago and he has plenty of experience. His only problem is that he is scared of losing people. He will keep shit around that doesn’t help his business even when there are replacements available. That’s OK. I will be helping him with his schedule today and some of that shit is going to find itself with about two days on the schedule. Hopefully they will just quit.
I have been reluctant to run anyone off from that store because it is harder to staff it than the other two and also because with my vacation next week I just didn’t want to jeopardize any chances of being off for a week. As a manager your time off is pretty much guaranteed but once you go a bit higher if your stores aren’t staffed you are pretty much shit out of luck. That’s why my days off have pretty much been cut in half over the last two months. I am averaging 5 days off per month over the first two months since I got promoted and don’t see it getting easier until the summer is over. I have one other guy that hasn’t had a vacation yet that will be taking it at the end of July and then I have a couple months of breathing room after that.