Happy Halloweenie

This week I was going to write about a sad story, but because of the holiday of Halloween, I changed my mind because it would probably be deemed as some sort of trick or treat joke. Instead, this week I decided to wish everyone to have a safe and happy Halloween.

To be relevant to Staples this week, I would like to say that only in 1 year out of the 12 ½ years that I worked for the company was Halloween ever celebrated. This was the only year that the store decided to give out candy. However, and this is a big however, the employees could not dress up in costume under any circumstances. Ironically this was their belief when celebrating any holiday. It’s sad that Staples resents all of the holidays.

This definitely was not the case back in Woolworth when not only was Halloween celebrated but was encouraged for the employees to dress up and not only that but we gave out a significant amount of candy in each of the 9 years I was with them. Maybe it helped that Woolworth was located in the mall and Staples is located in a strip mall.

So Woolworth was a party environment and Staples was a party-pooper environment.

Maybe that is where we get the phrase “Trick or Treat”, just many years too late.

Stay safe and stay away from the monsters at Staples otherwise you will feel tricked everyday.

The Last Meal I Never Had

Hilltop Steakhouse (Photo credit: Marissa Babin)

Please Note: This week’s special post will appear in all my blogs.

Back when I was younger in the 1970’s, our family would make the 2 ½ hour trip to Route 1 in Saugus Massachusetts to have lunch at the Hilltop Steakhouse Restaurant. You never could miss this place. It had fiberglass cows out front in a fenced in yard and a giant cactus sign out front announcing the restaurant’s name.

As the years wore on, we made fewer trips to the place as the lines usually were at least a 2 hour wait to be served. One time the wait would have been nearly 3 hours so we decided not to stay and wait. However, every time we did stay to have a meal we were never disappointed.

We had not gone to the restaurant in the last 10 years because nobody had the time to make the trip and waiting would be an all-day event. When initially we heard that the place was closing down at the end of October, we decided to make a date to make that one last trek to the iconic restaurant for that one final (hopefully enjoyable, but sad) meal.

So this last Tuesday, we decided to make that drive from southern Maine to Saugus Massachusetts. As we got closer to our destination, the anticipation of that last meal grew.

Then it happened.

We rounded up the hill on Route 1 and saw the giant cactus only to see the smaller sign before the large one saying “Open Until Oct. 20”.

What!?!

The local newspaper stated that the place was to be open until the 29^th. Imagine our disappointment when we found the building abandoned with “Closed – NO TRESPASSING” on all the windows.

Sadly, the cows were gone but the fence was still there. For the first time for use, the parking lot was completely void of any vehicles at all. So we left the empty parking lot and drove down the road a short distance to turn around and start that long journey back home.

Now, of course, I could have checked the restaurant’s website to tell that the place had closed. Unfortunately, with the exception of an update to the butcher shop specials, this site has not been updated since 2008. No mention of the closure could be found on the site anywhere. I did not bother doing a search for the company as I expected the place to be opened until the end of the month as promised.

So in the end, no meal for me or our family. But what happened to this company that always was very busy became a victim, according to the company, of a bad economy and a “dramatic drop” in customers based on competition from other places on the Route 1 highway.

However, this confuses me as many of the businesses on the nearby area were either crappy places, places long abandoned, or empty plots of land with new construction on them. It makes me wonder if this place was sold out to some developer who wants to use it for something else.

This same sort of thing happened a few years ago when Miller’s restaurant in Bangor Maine was closed because the temporary home of Hollywood Slots wanted the location because it was across the street from the future location that they was building. This also was a great restaurant of a buffet-style as opposed to a steakhouse variety. A sports bar has since opened in the location after the casino moved out.

Of course, we didn’t know about that closing until we arrived there and found it closed. It was during the in-between time when the restaurant had closed and the casino had moved in. It was yet another disappoint that we had over the years for the “they aren’t there anymore” syndrome.

Yes, it was sad that I didn’t enjoy one last beef meal at the steakhouse, but never was unexpected given our luck over the years. At least we have the internet to remind us of the pictures of what was one of the best meals ever had.

My score: Incomplete

Summary: If you didn’t make it before the closing like I did, then a great meal was missed. If only anyplace, anywhere at all, could compete to what this place had to offer than I would say I would try it. Goodbye cows. So long cactus sign. We hardly knew you.

Misdirected Anger

It seems that in the last week that people have become stupid and not just a little stupid, but to the point of misdirecting their anger at the wrong people.

For example, consider those veterans who took barricades from the war memorial in Washington D.C. and carried them to the gates of the White House and dumped them. Seriously, if these people were actually thinking then they would realize that the President did not cause the government to shutdown but it was the Congress that did so. However, in people’s haste and anger they directed their wrongful frustration to the person who really never caused the problem in the first place.

As a second example, consider that in a Louisiana Walmart, welfare customers went wild clearing the shelves of merchandise after finding out that their EBT Debit card (food stamps) was not working. Some of the customers even left the store with full carts of unpaid merchandise. This problem was not a Walmart problem, but a problem created by a glitch by Xerox, the company that runs the card program. Sadly, Walmart became a victim of somebody else's problem, which they had no control over.

Finally, a third example is the signing up for the Obamacare program. It is the programmers who developed the software that should be blamed and not the Obama administration as many media outlets have reported. Since the healthcare.gov website is a portal to state programs, it is the states that should be at fault for not having enough bandwidth to handle the incoming traffic. Other sites such as Twitter have suffered from similar problems in recent years. My response is “get over it and eventually everyone who wants to sign up will be able to, it is just that the system is clogged by too many users”.

As you can see from the examples above, people miss direct their anger at the wrong people more often than you think. As someone who worked in customer service for 25 years, I realize that customers misdirect their complaints about products to people like me instead of contacting the real source of many of the problems which is the companies themselves.

So what causes all these problems? I feel that people like to blame the easiest person that someone can get ahold of whether they are the source of the problem or not. Sadly, as long as people direct anger to the wrong people, mostly innocent people will get blamed or possibly hurt either in a verbal or sometimes as I have experienced firsthand, a physical one. The latter one which shows total disrespect and unfortunately for someone like me doesn’t get the kind of acknowledgement from management as it should, just like those people who misdirect their anger in the first place. I will have more to say about this type of abuse in a future posting.

In a way, I am glad that I am away from the customer service circle, as I feel that things have gotten progressively worse for many companies as people misdirect their anger even more so than ever. I really wish that management would step up more so to eliminate the problems, but they don’t which just adds more to the issue. I can only hope that people someday learn to direct their anger properly.

Pay for Nothing?

So here we are. The government has shut down, people are furloughed and soon if this is not solved it will trickle down to state levels.

The plan that Congress has is to pay these workers regardless whether or not they actually do any REAL work at all. On top of this, they can apply for unemployment benefits as well. Does this mean that they would have to look for a new job while collecting a paycheck from their government job at the same time?

Anybody else see a problem with this? Why should government employees get a free pass to get a government pay while robbing states of unemployment benefits?

While I like government employees being unemployed, I don’t care for them to double dip into funds that they don’t deserve either of. My suggestion is that if any member of Congress votes for this foolishness than I say that we the voters send them to the unemployment line without getting a government check anymore. It’s time that we slim down government, but not at the expense of paying them for doing nothing.

However, comparatively that evil company Staples is top-heavy with executives that should be let go as well and not given a check for doing nothing, which is the way the company has been operating for years. Their plan for existence is to eliminate store employees to pay for the corporate people. Just walk into any of their stores and you will see what I mean.

This is exactly what I did last week while I was away on a family trip. This is the reason why there was no post last week, but anyway I have visited this particular Staples store annually with basically the same results.

I walked into this particular location, which I won’t identify except to say it is in New England as I always would. At no point, was I ever neither greeted by anyone nor was I asked if I needed any help. I stayed in the store for about 20 minutes to see if anyone would ever come around to ask if I needed help. It never happened. In fact, I never saw an employee on the sales floor until I got to the door where I found just the unoccupied cashier and 4 (yes 4!) gray shirt managers talking amongst themselves while ignoring everything around them. Nobody, not even the dumb looking girl cashier acknowledged me on the way out the door. It was apparent that the store was run without employees and was held together with incompetent management that just didn’t care. It will be interesting to see what happens next year when I visit this location that is assuming that the location is still in business next year much less the company still in business.

Maybe a Staples shutdown is in order.