I view Papa John as being disingenuous when he complains about costs rising $5 - $8 million dollars a year causing his company all this potential financial hardship. According to the Forbes column I linked earlier Obamacare will cause PJ costs to increase by between 3 and 4 cents per pizza pie. And what does PJ do? Uses that to justify an almost 12 cent increase, nearly 3x the expected Obamacare impact, in pizza pie prices and cut back on labor costs.
I presume you accept that the government did its math correctly and has accounted for everything down to the last penny? Heck, for all we know, Obamacare might even cost LESS than they say it will, and that is a a valid outlook, right?
I presume that Forbes knows what it is writing about when it comes to business items.
From your comments, I have to assume you think the government has the right to over-regulate and micromanage what an owner can and cannot do with his own property that he has earned and accrued.
You "have to" assume that? :unsure:
And Schnatter didn't earn and accrue what he has in a vacuum. Where would his empire be without 10's of thousands of people willing to work at subpar wages and little to no benefits? I don't begrudge him becoming wealthy. What I don't like is the cavalier attitude shown in stories like this by owners towards those that do the actual work that causes companies like Papa John's to grow as successfully as Papa John's has.
Ahhhh... you've never owned a business have you. You never personally signed the loan notes and risked virtually everything. The "workers" got paid, didn't they? They, however, never signed on as co-owners and loan guarantors with their financial futures at absolute risk.
I will guess you don't want to sound like the illustrious leader by saying he didn't build it.
Where would those tens of thousands of workers be if Papa John had not worked his fingers to the bone, put up his own money and who knows what else to build this?
What it boils down to is that HE took all the risks. He could have ended up destitute and having to start over from scratch with no money if he had bolloxed it up. But he didn't. He built a giant in the industry.
All the workers have to do is submit a job application, get hired and do what is expected of them to draw a check. That is the contract between someone who conceptualized, designed and runs a business, and the people he hires to make it happen. They aren't noble heroes. They are people getting paid.
And their baseline appreciation is having a job, getting a paycheck so they can support their families, something they would have had to scrape out themselves, conceptualize themselves, sell themselves and assume all the risks themselves without someone like Papa John who did that FOR them.
They should be damned grateful. I know I am for my job.
I am not the type of person who can do what Papa John did, or the person who founded the institution that I work at. I know that. So I am exceedingly grateful that someone did that heavy lifting so I have a professional framework to learn and grow in. They don't owe me anything more than doing their best to run a self-sustaining profitable organization. In return, I work hard at my job to make sure I fulfill my end of the bargain.
Those are NOT "subpar wages" for the pizza business. Those are prevailing wages; otherwise employees leave PappaJohn's (since they are not chained to the tables) and seek employment elsewhere.