Tag Archives: workplace

The $1,000 Coffee Break

Janice | January 31, 2012 - 11:57 am

image via Visual Photos

Work perks.
Staffing firm Accounting Principals, which has just published its Workonomix Survey of workplace spending, found that 50 percent of the American workforce has a $20 weekly coffee habit, spending $1000 a year on workday coffee. Most consider it money well-spent.
Younger workers (ages 18-34) spend almost twice as much on coffee during the workweek as their older colleagues ages 45+: $24.74 vs. $14.15; men outspend women: $25.70 vs. $15.00.

The coffee break is a vaunted worker tradition. Legend has it that the world’s first coffee break took place around 1000 A.D. in Abyssinia, today’s Ethiopia. Long before the power and pleasure of the coffee plant had been discovered, a goatherd noticed his goats dancing around after eating its red berries. Following the goats’ lead, herders began indulging in the berries to stay awake during the long, boring stretches of watching the herds.

The coffee break first appeared in the U.S. in Stoughton, Wisconsin (home to the Stoughton Coffee Break Festival held every August) when the wives of 19th century Norwegian immigrants agreed to cover their husbands’ work shifts on the condition that they be allowed morning and afternoon breaks to go home to tend to household chores and brew up coffee. It was formalized as a workplace ritual in 1902 at the Barcolo Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, NY (rather appropriately, the manufacturer of Barcalounger recliners). In 1964 the coffee break was etched into U.S. labor history when negotiations between the United Auto Workers and the big three automakers nearly broke down over the practice. Other issues at those historic negotiations included health insurance, retirement benefits, and a 5% raise, but it was the coffee break that nearly brought about a strike. 74,000 workers at Chrysler came within an hour of walking off the job when the company relented and agreed to a 12 minute daily coffee break.

Did you know…
the espresso machine was invented in 1901 by an Italian factory owner as a way of speeding up his employees’ coffee breaks?  The first espresso machine, the Tipo Gigante, used a combination of steam and boiling water forced through coffee grounds to make a cup of coffee quicker than any other method in use.

The Coffee Break App for Mac can be set to remind you when it’s break time. It darkens your computer screen for the duration, lighting up again when break time’s over.

 

 

 

 

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Credit Card Fees on the Tip: Who Pays?

Janice | December 7, 2011 - 12:58 pm

Did you know that servers cover the tip’s fees on credit cards?

According to the federal fair labor standards, restaurant owners can (and they do) deduct the tip-related portion of their credit card processing fees from the tips given to servers. It’s a small amount from each tip (typically around 2%, and can go as high as 4%), but it adds up.

Take a restaurant chain like Olive Garden. The average location brings in nearly $5 million in revenue and there are 750 of them. Figuring tips as 15% of sales and about three-quarters of them going on credit cards, the fees collected on tips would be in the neighborhood of $14,000 for each restaurant and more than $10 million for the entire chain.

For a full-time waiter, the fee give-back adds up to an amount approaching $1,000 annually. That’s a lot of lost income to a predominantly minimum wage workforce, and let’s not forget that the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is a staggeringly stingy $2.13 an hour.

This is not meant to be an indictment of restaurant owners. They are simply passing the fees along to the credit card companies, and themselves feel the squeeze from credit card fees cutting into their slim margins. Still, the practice is controversial. Many in the industry view the credit card fees as any other cost of doing business, like the electric bill or linen rental, and believe that like those costs, should be borne by the owner. To date, the labor departments in 15 states have banned the practice.

According to the National Restaurant Association, diners now use plastic 80% of the time at fine dining establishments, 60% of the time at casual restaurants, and even 25% of the time for fast food. That tip you thought was 15%— it’s not.

 

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You Can Bring a Gun into a Restaurant in 49 States

Janice | October 3, 2011 - 10:54 am

image via the Chattanooga Pulse

 

Ohio recently  became the latest state to open its bar and restaurant doors to gun-toting customers. Ohio joins four other states, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia, that enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars, while 17 other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol. The status is fuzzy in another 20 states, including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, where legislatures have not explicitly addressed the question; by default they are allowing their residents to carry guns into establishments that serve alcohol.

These laws are the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, and represent progress made by the gun lobby as it seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life. They follow last year’s Supreme Court rulings affirming that citizens have an individual right to keep a loaded handgun for self defense. The rulings opened a floodgate of lawsuits challenging various state gun laws. Some of the most extreme proposals have come from gunslinging Governor Rick Perry who thinks Texans should always come to the table strapped, even when that table is in a school cafeteria.

The laws in most states allow people licensed to carry concealed weapons to take them into taverns, hotels, and restaurants. Armed customers are not supposed to drink, although that’s little comfort to servers and bartenders, many of whom feel that the mix of guns and alcohol-emboldened customers creates an unsafe work environment. Bars and restaurants are free to post signs banning weapons, but compliance can be iffy, with local gun-carry forums springing up to point out loopholes, and of course the weapons are concealed in the first place.

The logic of the madhouse
On November 1, when Governor Scott Walker signs Wisconsin’s Personal Protection Act into law, Illinois will be the nation’s last hold-out; the only state to prohibit the  carrying of guns into restaurants. It’s a sad day when a state’s General Assembly thinks its citizens need to carry weapons to be safe in restaurants.

We know that alcohol and firearms are a dangerous mix, but we seem to have lost touch with common sense on this life-and-death issue.

Keep up with the latest gun legislation with the public interest law center Legal Community Against Violence.

The NRA website has an interactive, state-by-state map of current firearm laws.

 

 

 

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The Hungriest Organ

Janice | September 26, 2011 - 12:43 pm

 

image via Walk the Road Less Traveled

According to the Journal of Physiology, your brain is just 2 percent of your body weight but sucks down 20 percent of your daily calories. Feed it right and you’ll be perky, productive, and alert. Junk it up with the wrong foods and you’ll never remember where you put your keys.

Breakfast
A little coffee and sugar can get your brain going in the morning. Caffeine fires you up pretty much instantaneously, and a sweet on the side adds to the effect: the duo can improve physical energy, short-term memory, and problem-solving skills, but it’s temporary, and there’s an equally fast drop in all of those as the caffeine wears off and your body has burned through the sugar.

Keep coffee and danish to a minimum; the better choice: citrus or berries (complex sugars to power up, anti-oxidants to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment), and cereal (protein for long-lasting brain energy, memory, and attention).

Lunch
An omelette and a salad are perfect midday brain food. The antioxidants in a salad can mop up the cell-damaging free radicals you’ve run into all morning from the ozone and pollutants, and the combination of vitamins C and E can improve cognitive skills and stave off Alzheimer’s Disease. A sprinkle of sunflower seeds, nuts, or dried herbs will add the vitamins, and dark green (romaine, spinach) or orange vegetables (carrots, sweet potatoes) are full of the antioxidant beta-carotene. The eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce a neurotransmitter that snaps your brain to attention and boosts memory.

Have a little yogurt for dessert and you’ll produce dopamine, the happy neurotransmitter, and noradrenalin, the perky hormone. Together they will help you face the afternoon with a smile.

Snacks
Your brain loves a good snack. A couple of pints of blood move through it every single minute, and the brain is always on the the lookout for nutrients in the flow; its favorite would be 25 grams of glucose in there, which is exactly one banana. Avoid junky processed foods with their trans-fatty acids. Rodents that are fed a steady diet of junk food get seriously confused by the classic rat-in-a-maze experiment, while in humans, highly-processed chips and baked goods have been implicated in a slew of mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD  to autism.

Dinner
Have a cocktail or two to increase the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. Eat fish to rebuild the cells and gray matter you were losing all day, and finish up with a dessert containing strawberries or blueberries, which seem to help with coordination, concentration, and short-term memory.

According to Men’s Health, you can tailor your food choices to suit specific mental tasks, from picking the best American Idol contestant to refinancing your mortgage. Check out its list of the best and worst brain foods for the job, which it claims can boost your brain’s productivity by 200 percent.

 

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Back to School with McDonald’s Hamburger University

Janice | August 30, 2011 - 10:50 am

McDonald’s Hamburger University
click on image to enlarge

It’s not the special sauce on the Big Mac or even the legendary french fries. McDonald’s is McDonald’s because of Hamburger University.

The school turned 50 this year and has 275,000 alumni, most working as store managers, franchise owners, and executives in McDonald’s headquarters. There’s no tuition, no SAT scores, and with 36,000 people vying each year for franchises, Hamburger University claims to be more selective than Harvard, with an acceptance rate of less than 1% compared to the Ivy League school’s 7%.

Most students at Hamburger U train at the picturesque Illinois campus near McDonald’s headquarters. They are a combination of current employees selected for their store management potential, mid-managers looking to move up, and potential franchise owners who have a minimum of $500,000 of non-borrowed personal resources and have demonstrated a kinship with the McDonald’s ethos, usually through a low-man stint as a floor mopper and french fry maker.

There’s some prep work before students arrive on campus, 5 days in residence spent in auditoriums and interactive classrooms, kitchen labs, and service training labs. Graduates also participate in follow-up course-work with one of the 22 training teams around the country. The average restaurant manager completes the equivalent of a semester of college–21 credit hours–that some colleges and universities will accept as transfer credits.

Like 60 per cent of the senior management of McDonald’s Corporation, CEO Jim Skinner began his career as a restaurant crew member. A Hamburger University grad, in 1971 Skinner was a McDonald’s manager trainee with a high school diploma. As CEO of the company (with annual personal compensation of around $18 million), he’s overseen the global expansion of Hamburger University, which has opened 6 additional campuses: in São Paolo Brazil; London, England; Munich, Germany; Tokyo, Japan; Sydney, Australia; and the newest Hamburger University in  Shanghai, China.

McDonald’s is the world’s leading global food service retailer with more than 32,000 locations serving approximately 64 million customers in 117 countries each day. Bloomberg Businessweek looks at the company’s plans to leverage the leadership skills of Shanghai’s Hamburger University graduates to fuel its big expansion plans in China.

 

 

Posted in fast food, food business | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Getting Burned by Culinary School.

Janice | May 13, 2011 - 11:22 am

Are culinary schools selling a fantasy?
That’s the question being asked by students who are graduating with loans to repay and job prospects that offer little more than minimum wage for often menial kitchen work. It’s also the question being asked by lawsuits filed on their behalf.

Last week a $40 million settlement was reached in one of the lawsuits.
Allison Amador et al. v. California Culinary Academy is a class-action lawsuit representing 8,500 former CCA students. The suit claims that the school misrepresented itself and the value of its degree. The settlement offers tuition rebates and student loan forgiveness for the grads, without an admission of wrong-doing on the part of the school.

The students were recruited by admissions officers who used the high-pressure tactics of a used car lot to fill their classrooms. CCA did in fact treat its staffers like salesmen, with quotas, commissions, and finders’ fees—no-no’s in education, and possibly even violations of federal law. Touting the school’s supposed selectivity and standing in the culinary community, the staffers pointed to celebrity and television chefs on its roster of graduates to hook starry-eyed recruits. Claiming a 97% placement rate—twice the documented rate—they encouraged applicants to pile on student loans to pay for the nearly $50,000, 15-month program.

CCA did have a distinguished reputation for turning out many of the passionate and creative culinary professionals that made the Bay Area a top dining destination. But all that changed in 1999 when the school was bought by the for-profit Career Education Corporation. In its first two years of ownership, the company quadrupled the number of students enrolled, increasing class sizes and cutting kitchen hours. Admissions standards and education quality dropped while tuition continued to rise. And CCA is not the only one. Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, Western Culinary Institute in Portland, the Texas Culinary Academy, and at least a half a dozen other cooking schools are facing similar lawsuits.

The business model doesn’t work.
A year’s tuition at a culinary school like CCA is nearly $50,0000. Most graduates land low-paying jobs as baristas, dishwashers, and prep cooks. Do the math: those student loans won’t be repaid for a long, long time.

Get a dose of reality: peruse the StarChef survey of culinary professional salaries.

 

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Not Such Top Chefs: Who’s making the real dough?

Janice | April 22, 2011 - 10:35 am

Celebrity chefs are big business.
They syndicate their own TV shows, command seven figure cookbook advances, and lend their names to endorse everything from ovens mitts to spaghetti sauce. A speaking engagement or cooking demo might net them upward of $50,000 for a few hours’ time, and investors line up to partner with them as they expand their restaurant empires into vacation hot spots from the Bahamas to Las Vegas.

What about the guy behind the stove at your corner bistro?
There’s no legion of fans swooning over his cooking on the Food Network—he just wants to impress the restaurant critic in the local paper and get a few good plugs in Yelp. He lives and dies by the table turn on a Friday night and the wholesale price of hanger steak.

Away from the spotlight, most chefs toil away in their kitchen clogs and baseball caps in semi-anonymity. They’re paid better than teachers, not as well as doctors, and probably not enough to afford them dinners out at restaurants as nice as theirs.

Here’s the skinny on who makes what in the kitchen.
Data comes from the culinary arts salary guide at AllCulinarySchools.com and the annual salary survey conducted by StarChefs.com. There can be significant differences between restaurant types and locations— salaries are all given as national averages.

Chef/Owner: $85,685
The dual role comes with the most creative freedom, but demands a double dose of pluck and fortitude and the ability to walk the line between craft and commerce, all while holding up both ends.

Executive Chef: $79,402
The kitchen’s top dog (absent an owner who cooks), the role tends to be more executive than chef, with hours spent on planning, costing, and ordering functions.

Sous Chef: $42,266
How’s that for a drop— little more than half their bosses’ salaries, and they’re the real workhorses. Sous chefs usually have the kitchen’s longest work day and its most brutal pace. See the one working through the staff meal? That would be the sous chef.

Pastry Chef: $48,861
Yeah, they don’t get the big bucks, or even their due, but then again, they only use their knives to cut through butter.

[image via MSN.

 

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Don’t Let the Weekday Lunch Go the Way of the 8-Track Tape.

Janice | January 24, 2011 - 10:11 am

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Lunch hour? Yeah, right.

Nearly half of all American office workers eat lunch at their desks three times a week; about a quarter of them do so everyday, and another 27% don’t even bother with eating. When a break is taken, it’s nearly always 30 minutes or less.

Blame it on the new, global capitalism. It’s lean and hungry. Time zones have lost all relevance when the workday clock is always ticking somewhere. In the modern work environment, overworking is worn as a badge of honor; taking time out for a leisurely lunch is seen as shirking. ‘Out to lunch’ is no longer just an idiom for someone who is out of touch and out of the loop—with a hamster wheel that never stops spinning, you step off at your own peril. [...]

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Can Your Boss Make You Be a Vegetarian?

Janice | November 22, 2010 - 11:53 am

Is a meat-free office policy going too far?

A former employee of an eco-friendly accessories manufacturer claims that her rights as a meat-eater were violated by company policy.
The company’s 18 employees are barred from bringing animal products in their lunches, and they are required to order vegetarian items when they dine in a restaurant with a client. The complainant says she was reduced to smuggling food into the office in her purse, or sneaking out to her car for a bite of a contraband tuna sandwich. [...]

Posted in food policy, vegetarian/vegan | Tagged , | 2 Comments

What Not to Eat on a Job Interview

Janice | November 5, 2010 - 11:53 am

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With unemployment hovering around 10%, it’s a safe bet that some of you are heading out on job interviews.
Interviews are stressful, nerve-wracking, and brain-draining. When the interview takes place over a meal, you’re throwing food on top of the stomach-churning anxiety.

You’ve got the warm smile and the hearty handshake down pat. You know how to listen carefully and formulate intelligent answers. But while eating?
Here are some ordering tips that can help you stay on your game during a meal-time interview. [...]

Posted in cook + dine | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Get Paid to Eat with Culinary Dream Jobs

Janice | September 13, 2010 - 12:39 pm

image via Jenni Brown Writes

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Nice Work if You Can Get It.

Who hasn’t fantasized about a dream job? I’m talking about the one where you get a nice paycheck to do something that doesn’t even feel like work—a semi-mythical gig like playing video games all day as a beta tester, or quality control taster for a brewery. For a food lover, the fantasy might be restaurant reviewer for the Parisian Michelin Guides or tasting new ice cream flavors at the Häagen-Dazs factory. [...]

Posted in food business | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Tipping Karma: Your Tipping Habits Made Public

Janice | July 2, 2010 - 11:44 am

 

Do you tip a straight 15%? Do you bump it up to 20% or more for really good service? Not to worry; you should be in the clear.

Bad tippers take note. They’re naming names.

If you are rude, if you are demanding, if you totally stiff your server, you just might find your name making the rounds in cyberspace on a list of bad tippers. Waiters, bartenders, even pizza delivery guys all have their go-to websites for rants and revenge, pulling transaction details from credit card receipts and posting them anonymously. The tweets could be flying before you get your car back from the valet parker (and yes, they have their own site).

Find out what your servers really think of you.

Waiter Rant has made an industry of tipping tales with a popular blog and a best-selling book, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter. Here you’ll learn how the car you drive tells the world what kind of tipper you are, and why the check for your table of 6 included a gratuity charge.

Bitter Waitress pulls no punches with posts like Man and Fat Wife’s Anniversary, and Stop Coddling the Whiny, Bitchy People.

Is your name among the thousands of entries in the Lousy Tippers Database? With the ominous subtitle ‘There is a Consequence,’ let’s hope not.

Another place that servers go to share is the Facebook page Bad Tippers Suck! where they like to remind you that there is no such things as over-tipping.

Celebrity Tipping: the stuff of legend.

All eyes are on them as they stride in with entourage and attitude. They are fully aware of the scrutiny, the flash of cell phone cameras, the gossip that moves at the speed of light. But still, they engage in heinous acts of tip stiffing. Such hubris! Of course their servers are only too happy to share sordid tales of rude behavior and lousy tips.

Sullen, petulant Russell Crowe appears on the list of the 10 best celebrity tippers while perpetually cheery Rachael Ray is one of the 10 worst. Go figure.

Stained Apron identifies celebrities as ‘Saints’ and ‘Scum,’ claiming that tipping habits are the true test of inner peace and civility. We could have guessed about Uma Thurman, but it’s nice to know that the former members of the Village People wear the halo. It seems that most members of Congress are going to hell, but we already knew that.

Here’s a tip: don’t wait until you see your name on a bad tippers’ database to give a jolt to your conscience. From sommeliers to tattoo artists, find out the appropriate gratuity for all the service workers in your life with these tipping guidelines.

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Posted in cyberculture, restaurants | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Farm Volunteers: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Janice | February 8, 2010 - 9:11 am 

     image courtesy of Culinary Cory
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Budget travel. Eco-tourism. Agri-tourism.

If you’re looking for the kind of relaxation that comes from sitting on a beach, this is not for you. If you take your rusticity in small, controlled doses then I suggest you look elsewhere.

If you would like to make a genuine connection with the food you eat, gain some practical skills, and immerse yourself in the culture of the sustainable food movement, this is your opportunity. [...]

Posted in sustainability, Travel, workplace | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Eat Like an Astronaut: on board the International Space Station

Janice | February 4, 2010 - 12:53 pm

The kitchen is small and cramped. Food prices are high. There are tons of ethnic dining options. The International Space Station sounds a lot like a New York City apartment.

It costs $40,000 a day to feed an astronaut.

It’s all about the delivery costs: more than $10,000 to blast a pound of food into outer space, with each astronaut allotted 3.8 pounds of food a day. And while it’s come a long way from the days of freeze-dried ice cream and squeeze tubes of baby food-like purees, there are some serious limitations to cooking in space. The refrigerator is tiny, food packets are heated in suitcase-like food warmers, and meals have to be velcroed onto trays so they won’t float away. [...]

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Lunchtime: Death by Internet

Janice | September 18, 2009 - 9:15 am

The British newspaper The Telegraph recently published a list of 50 things that are being killed by the Internet.

The list itemized some of the bygone civilities that we will miss: handwritten letters (#12); the pleasures of flipping through a photo album (#15): or listening to a record all the way through (#3). There were relics we haven’t noticed in years: telephone directories (#8); footnotes instead of links (#47); and street corner prostitution (#45). And a few significant losses that could drive a person to Ludditism: punctuality (#5); memory (#13); privacy (#31); and enforceable copyright protection (#22). [...]

Posted in Entertainment, shopping, workplace | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment
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