High Five Friday 7/12/2019 (Patreon)

Hope things are going well since the last time you read this. Jacksonvile, FL has tickets available now! You can get tickets and info for DC, Chapel Hill, Nashville, and Atlanta on our site. 11 days in a van with The Sams and the The Trillbillies and Means TV is going to be wild. I will keep y'all updated the best I can.  Here is a Sneak Peak of the tee. Before we get started.

Who all is going to Lights For Liberty tonight? If you're seeing this later, how did it go?

• Amerigo Gazaway- Fela Soul (video above) - Amerigo Gazaway is an extremely talented mashup remixer. If you visit their Youtube channel you will find incredible mashups of legendary albums. Fela and De La is a match made in heaven! New way to enjoy some old classics. Yasiin Bey/ Marvin Gay, Common/Stevie Wonder, etc. For crate diggers, old heads, and mix masters.

• Treasure Toad (I kept my original dad answer. It's Captain Toad Treasure Tracker.) - Really fun and adorable puzzle game. Simple to play but very hard to perfect. Great for playing with a kid.

• 12 Angry Men - I remember watching this as part of social studies class and not caring about it very much. So recently I have been letting the Taste app decide my movies and this one came up and I ran with it. It's still just as poignant as it was back then. Lots of incredible scenes that are so relevant to modern day family Facebook fighting. Great film.

• Fruit Salad - If you're a bad or inexperienced cook or you don't have time to cook, fruit salad is the best option to bring to summer cookouts. You need fifteen or twenty minutes to cut and then you're done. The biggest downfall here is buying too many types of fruit and spending a ton of money.  Throwing it on top of nilla wafers and putting whip cream on top is the supreme way to eat it. Here are some of my tips.

• Pineapple or watermelon is my preferred base because it goes far, soaks up juice, and can be acquired cheaply.  
• I like apples because they stay crispy when they're cubed. 
• A pound of frozen mixed berries is $3 but a pint of all 3 is $10+. 
• grapes, cut in half because plastic forks will break them.
• Avoid bananas I don't know how that ever became a thing.
• You gotta pour some orange juice on it so everything stays fresher and tastes great
• melon is controversial everyone I know picks it out but if you want it in your fridge go for it
• dash of salt

• So I used to work at a busy To-Go/Cashier stand for this small, popular, local restaurant. At the time, - it started at $8/hour plus tips, and they were pretty good in the beginning. Then, there was a huge focus from  upper management on managers staying in the dining room and leaving the cashiers to die and sometimes only one person would work a busy part of the day. Cashiers were expected to operate 2 separate phones for orders, bag the orders, go through every single order with the customer (whether they asked to or not), take payments, and help out servers. (More stuff too, but this was the minimum expected) Customer complaints were through the roof apparently, especially whenever they cut down to only one cashier. But upper management didn’t care. It was all about the dining room. So tips started to suffer.

       This restaurant had employee concern cards that they encouraged us to write on for anything that concerned us, and the CEO would personally read every one of them. They said we could remain anonymous as well. They probably only wanted them anonymous for us to snitch on people for stealing.

       After one particularly bad shift, I wrote a card anonymously about how cashiers felt overwhelmed, and asked for more cashiers to be hired/ scheduled, more manager help, or more pay. I was trying to be understanding of upper management’s position. A few weeks later, the restaurant added DoorDash and tips suffered even more and the work was even harder. Again I wrote an anonymous card asking for the same things.

      Soon after the second card was put in, a cashier staff meeting was called. The CEO had sent a memo for one of the managers to read to all of us. He started off by telling us that we make more than we should and that the main store is better and they deserve more money and that we complain too much and are ungrateful. He had specific numbers about sales and number of calls to try and prove his point, but forgot to mention that the main store always has at least 3-6 people working the Cash Stand and also has another phone line, and just a better setup in general. The manager that was reading the CEO’s memo skipped a point in the memo, which I later found out was belittling whoever sent in the cards for remaining anonymous and “not displaying our value of courage.” I begrudgingly went into my shift the next day, but when I arrived, the managers were all surprised I was there. When I asked why I wouldn’t come in, I could never get a straight answer. I no called no showed for the rest of my shifts there, and didn’t receive a single call asking where I was. They knew what was up. Apparently, the CEO looked at the cameras to see who had put the card in anyways. I found out a few months later that the restaurant had raised the starting wage of cashiers by $1/hour. Glad I was able to make a change.

If you want more to know about more things I like you can find them here. 

Thanks,

Brett