Auld Lang Syne, or SSDD

There are a few things you need to know as background for this.

First, instead (as you may assume) of orders coming in and automatically printing to our warehouse to be packed and shipped, our IT guys collect, process, and print out orders twice daily. Someone from the warehouse comes in and gets them and gets them shipped ASAP. When this process is done, credit cards are processed and we get money.

Second, a couple months back, our company switched to having some Indian/Pakistani/Malaysian/Whatthehellever firm handle orders after hours and on the weekends. We did this because it was cheaper than keeping the building operating all weekend and because shippers didn't pick up on Sunday and event he ones that picked up on Saturday didn't really ship until Monday anyway.

Third, if you're salaried, you get no overtime. You get no flex time. You get no compensation whatsoever for time spent working before 8 AM or after 5 PM. If you do it, you do it out of your own kindness or because you want to save yourself some grief the next time you do work.

Finally, we just concluded one of our best months ever. I can't tell you how well the catalog side did because I'm not party to their figures. However, I can tell you that the web side's best month in 2005 was January...until December beat it by 50%+.

Let me also explain the management theory of income around here. If you're behind your sales goal for the month (which was not based on anything other than a fanciful guess), you kick and beat your employees to pull in as much money as they can so you get as close as possible. If you're going to make your goal, you kick and beat your employees to pull in as much money as they can so you beat it by as much as possible. If you're going to exceed your goal, you kick and beat your employees to pull in as much money as they can because you're a greedy f'ing prick and you don't care if you burn our your whole staff by keeping them in crisis mode all the time. After all, there are whole agencies out there dedicated toward staffing your sweatshop, so why not take advantage of them?

So Bill decided that to celebrate this huge-income month, he was going to ban all vacation between December 26th and January 1, 2005 AND that the warehouse, customer service, and IT would all be asked (read: threatened with their jobs) to come in on December 31st. NOT ONLY THAT, but that IT would be processing orders -- not their usual twice daily, but -- at 8AM, noon, 2PM, 6PM, and...wait for it...hold on, this is a doozy...can you guess?...11PM! Last order processing at 11PM on New Year's Eve! AND, at that point the warehouse would have to pick, pack, and scan all 10 orders that might be coming in from that last processing.

Did I mention that the decision was made Wednesday, December 28th?

Knowing that we do almost no business after 8PM, New Year's Eve being no exception, what do you think the motivation was for this move? Squeezing every last dollar out of the year so it could be added to the bottom line.

Greed.

Now, I can deal with greed in business. It's not my style, but it makes sense that greed can help a business run. But let's break this down. Let's be generous and say we get to credit an extra $100k in sales to this year. That's roughly $40k in profit. Now you have to heat and power the building for an extra day. I have no idea what that costs, but lets say $200. Now, you have to have IT guys, a warehouse manager, and a customer service manager come in -- oh wait, we're not compensating them, never mind. Let's figure a skeleton crew of 6 customer service folks at $10/hour each - $900. Let's figure the same for warehouse people (it's probably more people, but less money) - $900. At least three VPs are going to come in. They're not going to do anything productive, but they'll be there to prove their loyalty to the company and at least give themselves one extra day off, which is like burning a day's salary for each - $1,700.

So, somewhere around 20 people and their families get their holiday ruined, you're not going to let them take off Monday the 2nd, despite the fact that the handbook says they're entitled to it (for no apparent reason, you just felt like mandating it), further lowering moral and increasing distrust of management, all to clear about $36k, which isn't more money you're making, just money you're stealing from next year while torching $3,700 in the process. That about the size of it? I hope it was worth it. When one of those people you railed comes in with a gun, it's going to be completely your own fault, and I'm going to laugh my ass off.