Courtesy Calls: The Better Business Bureau (1)

Rule 3: Solve the information problem. The rest solves itself.

I was not eavesdropping on the woman at Holt's, because eavesdropping implies effort, and the woman's voice required none.

She was two stools down on a Tuesday morning in May, talking to someone on her phone with the particular volume of a person who has decided that what she is saying deserves the room's attention whether the room has volunteered for it or not. I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper. Pearl was at the far end rinsing something in the sink. The morning was doing what mornings at Holt's do, which is arriving without announcement and settling in.

The woman was telling whoever was on the other end about her daughter's paycheck. Her daughter worked at a chicken place on 64 — she did not give a name, though the name would come later through different means — and the issue was tips. Not missing tips, which is a problem with a single point of failure. Short tips. The check said one thing and the jar said another and the difference lived in a space her daughter couldn't account for and couldn't afford to ask about, because asking about it required talking to the man who controlled the schedule and the schedule was the other lever, and you don't grab for one lever when someone else's hand is already on both. The woman said this last part — not in those words, but in the exhausted shorthand of a mother watching her daughter learn what the working world teaches people who work in it — with the flat resignation of someone who understands that certain kinds of theft are designed to be too small to fight and too steady to survive.

I did not say anything. I did not turn toward her. I folded my paper. I finished my coffee. I left three dollars on the counter and said goodbye to Pearl, who said goodbye without looking up from the sink, which is how we handle Tuesdays.

I drove home on roads I know the way I know the weight of a thermos by the sound it makes when I set it on the counter. The twelve acres were quiet. The wood line was full of the particular green that May produces in the Piedmont when the rain has done its work and everything has committed.

I had not been looking for a project. Projects find me when the information arrives in a form I recognize, which is what the woman's voice had done — not the volume or the complaint but the word short. Short means systemic. Short means someone built a machine and the machine has moving parts and the parts are people and the people cannot see the machine from the inside because the inside is where they work.

I decided I would find the machine.

Thurman Yow operated three restaurants in the Triad. Two on Route 64, one on East Green Drive in High Point. I located his name through the county business registry, which is public, and confirmed his ownership through a franchise filing with the Secretary of State, which is also public. He had held the licenses for eleven years. The restaurants were chicken — a regional chain with enough locations in the Piedmont that nobody thinks about who owns any particular one, which is the kind of invisibility a man like Thurman Yow would have appreciated about the investment. The problem was not the chicken. The problem was what Thurman Yow was doing with the people who made it.

I spent two evenings on the public record before I visited the first location. What I was looking for was the shape of the operation — how many locations, how many employees, what the revenue profile suggested about cash flow. The franchise disclosures were available through the Secretary of State's office. Business license renewals were on the county portal. Health inspection records gave me employee counts by location at the time of each inspection. None of this was difficult to find. It was difficult to look for if you didn't know it existed, which is a different problem — a problem of knowing where to look rather than how. Most of the systems that protect working people are public record. Most working people do not know this. The asymmetry is not accidental.

I visited the first location on a Wednesday afternoon. Route 64, east of Asheboro, a cinderblock building with a painted sign and a parking lot that could hold about thirty cars and was holding eight. The inside had the standard composition of franchise chicken restaurants in the Piedmont — a counter, a menu board with backlit photographs of food that resembled the actual food in the way that campaign promises resemble policy, a dining area with fixed seating, and a television running a talk show nobody was watching.

The floor had been mopped recently enough that the chemical smell was still in the air. Industrial cleaner, the pine-and-ammonia kind that institutions buy in bulk. I know the smell. My mother used it — a different brand, the one you buy yourself because the families whose houses you clean provide the one they prefer, and you bring your own for the jobs that don't specify. A sharp smell. I stood at the counter and it was in the room and then it was gone and I ordered a two-piece and a sweet tea.

I paid cash. I sat by the window and ate my chicken, which was adequate, and watched the operation.

Three workers on the floor. A woman on the register, a man on the fryer visible through the service window, and a younger woman restocking the drink station. The tip jar was on the counter near the register — a plastic cylinder with a handwritten label and roughly four dollars in visible bills. I noted the jar's position, which was beside the register rather than between the register and the customer, meaning the customer had to reach past the completed transaction to use it. This is a design choice. Whether Thurman Yow made it or the counter worker made it or the franchise required it, the result was the same: the jar was accessible but not convenient, which is how you reduce tips without forbidding them.

I left a five in the jar on my way out. I also left a two-dollar bill on the counter directly in front of the register worker, separate from the jar, which she looked at for a moment before picking up. She was maybe fifty, heavyset, with the kind of face that comes from being looked through by most of the people she feeds and looked at by a few.

I went home. I made notes. I came back the following Wednesday.

Over the next two weeks I visited all three locations. The two on 64 and the one in High Point. I varied my days and times. I was a customer who liked chicken, who paid cash, who was friendly to the workers and forgettable to the managers. Most of the world is composed of people who like chicken and pay cash and are forgotten by Thursday.

What I was building was a picture of how Thurman Yow's operation handled money. The picture assembled itself over visits the way these things do — not as a revelation but as a confirmation of what the first visit had suggested.

The scheduling was the first thing. At all three locations, the weekly schedule was posted where the workers could see it and the customers could see it if they cared to look, which most did not. I looked. Over four visits I documented two full weeks of shift assignments, and what I saw was a system of split shifts and rotating closers designed to keep individual workers below the threshold where overtime calculations kicked in. A worker might close on Monday, open on Wednesday, close again on Friday — never accumulating enough consecutive hours for the protections to engage. This is legal. It is the kind of legal that exists because the law was written by people who do not work split shifts and revised by people who have never had to calculate whether the cost of a Tuesday daycare slot they cannot use is greater or lesser than the cost of the Wednesday hours they were not given.

The tip jars were the second thing. Every location had one. Every location positioned it slightly differently, but the principle held: present and inconvenient. At the High Point location, the jar had a lid with a slot too narrow for folded bills, which meant a customer had to flatten the bill or use coins. I watched a man try to put a five in the slot, fail, set the bill on the counter, and walk away. The register worker picked up the bill and straightened it through the slot. The process took about fifteen seconds and was observed by nobody except me and the security camera above the register, whose red light I had noted on my first visit and which was angled to cover the register and the jar simultaneously. This told me something about what Thurman Yow considered worth monitoring.

And the workers themselves were the third thing, because what people tell you when you ask them a specific question in a specific way tells you whether the question is safe to answer. I asked how the schedule was treating them. I asked if they were getting enough hours. The answers were careful — careful in the way of people who have learned that the wrong answer to a friendly question can cost more than the right answer to an official one.

The offense was public, deliberate, repeated across eleven years and three locations, and built by a man who understood precisely what he was taking and from whom. My criteria were satisfied before the third week. I continued the observation because the observation was also the operation — the file required specifics, and specifics required time in the restaurants, and time in the restaurants required being a customer who talked to workers and remembered their names and came back on Wednesdays.

I was asking these questions at the 64 East location, which had become my regular stop, and the person I was asking them of was a young woman named Sheryl.

Sheryl worked the counter three days a week and wanted four. She had been at this location for seven months, which she told me on my third visit, not because I asked directly but because I mentioned that I hadn't seen her the previous Wednesday and she said she'd been moved to the Thursday-Saturday rotation, again, which was the third time in two months. The word again did the work of a longer explanation.

She was twenty-three or twenty-four. She had a daughter named Kayla in daycare and a car payment on a Civic she'd bought from a lot on South Fayetteville that I knew by reputation to be the kind of lot that extends credit to people who cannot get credit anywhere else, at terms designed to ensure they remain people who cannot get credit anywhere else. She did not tell me any of this in sequence. It arrived over visits, in the way personal information arrives when a person decides you are safe to talk to, which is a decision most people make below the level of language, and are right to.

I was safe to talk to. I was a regular. I came in on Wednesdays and ordered the same thing and paid cash and said thank you and asked how she was doing in a way that indicated I was prepared to hear the answer. These are not sophisticated techniques. They are the way you build rapport with a person, which is also the way you build a file on an operation, and the fact that both descriptions apply to the same set of actions is something I have thought about and not resolved to my satisfaction.

On my third visit I asked her, while she was making change, whether the schedule treated her all right. It was the kind of question a regular asks — conversational, not pointed. She said it was fine. She said it in the way people say a thing is fine when the thing is not fine but the person asking has not yet earned the real answer. I noted the deflection. I did not push. I left my usual tip on the counter and told her I'd see her next Wednesday, and something in the way she said "If I'm here" told me the schedule was the pressure point and the pressure was not new.

On my fourth visit, Sheryl was wiping down the counter when I came in. She had a rag in her left hand and was running it in small circles while her right hand organized the receipt paper beside the register — both motions simultaneous, automatic, the efficiency of someone whose hands have learned to occupy themselves without consulting the rest of her. I noticed the circles. They were the particular circles of a person who has cleaned surfaces enough that cleaning has become a rhythm rather than a task, a motion that lives in the hands and does not require the mind's participation.

I ordered my two-piece. I sat down.

She brought it to my table, which she had started doing on the third visit — carrying the tray over instead of calling my number, because the restaurant was mostly empty on Wednesday afternoons and because she had decided I was the kind of regular who warranted the small courtesy of delivery.

"They moved my Thursday again," she said, setting the tray down.

"Where'd they put you?"

"Saturday close. Which means I'm off Monday and Tuesday, which means Kayla's in daycare two days I'm not working, which is—" She stopped. "It's just how it works. You move one thing and three other things move."

She was looking at the counter, not at me, the way people look away from the thing they're saying when the thing they're saying has been true for a long time and they're tired of watching it be true. Her guard was down. Not because of anything I'd done — because the frustration was old and the complaint was practiced and she was standing in an empty restaurant on a Wednesday telling a regular about the math of her week. I waited exactly long enough for the sentence to settle, the way you wait when someone has finished a thought and the next thought is adjacent and you want the adjacency to feel like theirs.

"How does that work with the tips?" I said. "Saturdays better than Thursdays?"

The question landed inside the complaint she'd already started, and she answered it as part of the same thought rather than as a new subject. She told me that Saturdays were busier but the tip pool was split across more workers, and that Mr. Yow — this was the first time she used his name to me, which I noted — had a policy of rolling the tip pool into a weekly distribution rather than a daily one, which meant the Saturday tips got diluted across the full week's roster. She said this the way you describe weather. Not as a grievance. As a condition of the atmosphere you live in.

"He takes a cut?" I said.

"Management fee." She picked up an empty tray from the table behind me, where a family had left it with their napkins and a half-eaten biscuit. "For administering the pool."

I watched her carry the tray to the counter. I ate my chicken. I thought about the phrase management fee and about the particular kind of man who looks at a tip jar full of money that customers gave to workers and sees an administrative opportunity.

I left five dollars on the table, separate from the tip jar. When Sheryl picked it up she looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything about what it meant, which was that I understood the jar was not a reliable delivery mechanism and she understood that I understood, and something in the way she folded the bill and put it in her apron pocket rather than the jar told me she had been making this distinction for a while.

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/courtesy-calls-better-business...