Food for Thought

Not sure how often I will do this, but a particular verse stood out to me the other day that is very applicable to our current economy. Proverbs 14: 4 states, “where no oxen are, the crib is clean; but much increase is by the strength of oxen.” Now some of you may be thinking, “dude, we aren’t amish, so why should we care about a bunch of oxen?” There is an underlying principle regarding work and profits.

If you were to take a look at a persons pristine stable, they might make a boast of how nice it looks. You would tend to agree, but after you look around, you notice there are no oxen.

“Where are your oxen?” you might ask.

“They were making way to much of a mess, and have you seen how much they eat? Anyway, it is clean in here, and we are saving so much money on feed. It is ridiculous.”

“So who runs the plow and pushes the grindstone?”

“What?”

Fast-forward to todays economy, retail and customer service especially.

“Our company is boasting great profits this year. We have drastically cut our expenses and while we may not be making more money, we sure are spending less.”

“That’s awesome. So where are all of your employees?”
“Well, we did do some layoffs, it is expensive to take care of all of those people. Not only do you have to pay them, the experienced ones think they deserve more money for their faithfulness and the government only gives us a couple of million for providing benefits. We just overwork the ones we have now, threatening their jobs just often enough to make them think they need us, which keeps them too busy to find something else.”

“So who is actually taking care of your business and customers?”

“What?”

I wish that were an exaggeration of the corporate mentality, but I don’t really think it is. The corporate world has in essence lost site of the fact that employees accomplish the work that needs to be done. There is no “increase” by cutting labor costs, only badly treated employees and frustrated customers. But there are a few things we can do. First, don’t get mad at the person helping you because there is no one else to help; they know and are feeling the brunt of being the only one to help you. Contact corporate offices, brag on how awesome the employees were, and then say more employees would be helpful; when you start with the negative, the good employees suffer, and the real problem is never addressed. Finally, if you can, start a local business that caters to the same needs, steal the good people from the big stores if the big stores refuse to listen and make the right kind of changes. (If you do this last one, hire me for a really awesome job like sampling food and testing video games or something).