Managers - Part XXIX - (Post Pandemic #4) - What the Hell Happened to Customer Service?

Once upon a time business competed mainly on one aspect of their business: value. Was the quality of the product worth the price they were charging? Was the product of such sterling quality that the price was out of reach for most consumers? Was the price super-affordable but the product broke down soon after purchase? Companies looked for the balance between price and quality and battled with competitors on that basis. Then came Walmart. Most retailers couldn't compete with Walmart on price, and were often selling the same products, so they had to emphasize that ephemeral aspect of the buying experience: customer service. 

The phrase "the customer is always right" predated Walmart, but surely came into its own as a strategy to lure people away from the Bentonville Behemoth. No action was too servile if it meant keeping a customer from defecting to the low price leader down the street. Retailers in effect trained their customers to be assholes, since that was a surefire way to get what you wanted.  Customer service in the Walmart era meant that customers could scream profanity at retail workers or outlandish demands and managers would acquiesce, afraid of losing just one customer. The whole system was out of balance.  

The roots of change can be traced back to 2015, when the unemployment rate started to flirt with the 3% level. It accelerated when, during the pandemic and immediately after, when service workers realized that they had the power to set the terms of their own employment. Knowing that if they quit or were fired, another job with similar pay could be had in short order, many did quit if they didn't like the work environment. The management-employee dynamic became more balanced, if not skewed toward the employee. Overall, this was a good thing. Employees with a solid work ethic were no longer content to be enslaved by their employers. The problem is that not all employees had a solid work ethic.

Let's divert for a moment to define "customer service". I would define it as giving the customers what you advertised you would give them — this includes stock levels; and interacting with them in a civil, polite, manner — including dropping personal conversations or cell phone use when a customer needs some help. In my view a friendly demeanor is a plus, but not required. I'm not shopping in your store looking for friends. 

Back to comparative work ethic. 

Mainly due to the false perception that "nobody wants to work" and various corollaries as well as the very real low unemployment rate, managers are afraid to fire bad employees. No manager wants to be short staffed. Staff has to work harder to make up for missing people, or work simply doesn't get done because there aren't enough people to do it. Corporate executives don't want to hear what they term excuses and usually are not interested in altering expectations to accommodate the new reality. When I ran a grocery store the standard in the in-store bakery was for an employee to take a customer's doughnut request and remove it from the case and bag it up for them. The result was that one employee was tied up during peak times and one customer with a large order could cause a line — when customers would be just as happy to get their own doughnuts. Eventually, after many years, the corporate office figured it out, but not because anyone at the store level complained about it. 

So what do managers do? Two things: (1) They hire using the "warm body" principle and (2) They put up with what should be unacceptable behavior from employees. #1 is because they are in a hurry to get someone hired, and #2, they are terrified that someone is going to quit and they'll be short staffed until they can hire another warm body that incidentally they don't have the time or the staff to train properly. 

Employees at  entry-level jobs are not stupid. It doesn't take them long to see that there are no consequences to not doing the job that they were hired to do. A bad employee will just get worse seeing that management ignores them and a good employee will soon see that working hard and following company policy just means that they're doing the work of the bad employee. Overall productivity and customer service levels plummet. Who's at fault in this state of affairs? The managers.

When I say "managers", it's ultimately the fault of the level of management that makes decisions. A store manager has to have the guts to set standards and stick by them. If an employee is not doing their job, the manager can't be terrified that the sky will fall if the employee terminated and they are short-staffed. Corporate management has to be flexible enough to allow their retail-level managers the freedom to adjust expectations in response to changing situations, and not wait for months of meetings to green-light a decision that the leaders on the front lines know must be done. Earlier in this post I mentioned that in the Walmart era companies trained their customers to be assholes. In this post-pandemic era, companies have trained their employees to be bad employees. The solution isn't to update the employee handbook, or to embark on a search for the perfect employee — rules are ineffective if they're not enforced and "perfect" employees quickly devolve into horrible employees if they see that being a bad employee is the easier path. 

It's not an employee problem, it's a manger problem.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Managers - Part XXVIII - (Post Pandemic #3) - Maintaining Balance

One of the things that many employees learned during the pandemic was that it was acceptable to set boundaries for themselves. Sometimes those boundaries were entirely appropriate, other times they were simply ridiculous. It became normal for people to refuse to work their schedule, take off during busy times of year, and refuse to do simple job requirements — they knew that their managers would have difficulty replacing them and that they had the upper hand in the employee-employer relationship. But one of the main causes of strife between workers and management is a lack of honesty at the onset of the relationship.   

When I was in management, one of the more frustrating issues was new employees changing their availability. We would advertise for a position and would usually be pretty clear about what the schedule would be. We would hire someone based upon their availability and willingness to work that schedule only to find out that their actual availability was quite different. Once we advertised for a weekend clerk in the meat department. Since we usually gave workers one weekend day off the pool of potential staff was reduced on weekends when we were busiest — we thought if we could find someone who was only available on Saturdays and Sundays that would help our staffing problems. We found someone who assured us that he wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays, but after about a month he was complaining that he never got weekends off! Applicants who changed their availability shortly after being hired was quite common. I assume that the strategy was to get their foot in the door and then try to change up their schedule after being trained and we had invested time in them. 

Lest you think I'm suggesting that the problem was solely caused by employees — the flip side of this is employers who expect their staff to put up with ever-changing schedules, wildly varying hours and the expectation to drop everything when the boss needed them. When I lived in Kearney and worked at a Burger King, I might be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 12 the next. When I worked for UPS over the holidays (it was a temporary position) I was scolded for asking to be unavailable for one day to go for a job interview for a permanent job. I had given several days notice. What was galling was that I never knew from day to day whether I would be called in to work; I usually wouldn't hear until around 10:00AM if I was going to work that day. Employers should be honest about the requirements of the job and potential employees should be honest about what they're willing to do. 

One thing that many people don't understand is that a business exists not to provide jobs, but to sell products or services and make a profit doing it. Since labor costs typically are the single greatest expense, business owners will do what it takes to minimize, or even eliminate, the number of employees that they need to keep the doors open. Many of us complain about, for a variety of reasons, the proliferation of self checkouts, but this is but the latest example in a long trend of automation. Think about bar codes and scanners on check stands. When I was in my late teens I worked in a hardware store. We used a pricing gun to price by hand  every single item in the store. Cashiers would hand enter the price of every single item that they sold. Now we take the existence of bar codes and scanners for granted. When was the last time someone pumped your gas for you? Automation in manufacturing is something that has been progressing for decades, something that unions fight against...at least where there are unions. We may not like it, but that's the reality of it. But despite the creeping influence of automation, most businesses still require human beings in some capacity. 

Most businesses have busy times. They may be certain times of day, days of the week or seasons of the year. When I worked in retail grocery we had a pretty good idea when our busy times would be and tried to plan accordingly. One of my tasks was to project what our sales would be in each department every week, sometimes down to the day or hour during holiday weeks. If both the employer who is hiring staff and the job seeker are both honest they will each reveal what is necessary for a hire to take place. A grocery store that is going to be "all-hands-on-deck" during Christmas or Independence Day weeks should be upfront about there being no time off during that period; a job hunter who is unwilling to forgo family time during the holidays should make that plain and probably seek employment elsewhere. Taking a job knowing the restrictions, yet intending to flout them in the future is dishonest, just as withholding key requirements or information about scheduling just to get someone on the payroll is also deceitful. 

One of the worst things that a manager can do is hire someone just to get a warm body on board, or retain a nonperforming employee to avoid be shorthanded. And I'll include in "nonperforming" an employee who refuses to do what the job requires of them. There has always been the tendency among rookie managers to do this, but the low unemployment rate and the willingness of people to quit at a moment's notice has made the practice more prevalent. Nothing good can come of situations like this, and there are multiple negative consequences: (1) Work doesn't get done even though someone is still getting paid to do it, and (2) Built up resentment from the "good" employees. I can go on all day about how departments became more productive, working short-staffed after a lazy employee quit or was fired. Productivity will be negatively affected when other employees or the manager has to pick up the slack or constantly correct errors. 

In addition to resentment and extra work, an unpopular opinion is that it is not the manager's job to "do the work". A manager's job is not to do things, but to get things done. Of course this doesn't mean that a manager should ideally be sitting in the back room, feet up, sipping coffee all day. Depending on the business a manger might also be responsible for ordering stock, doing payroll or even stocking shelves, but it's a misunderstanding of the manager's role to believe that the main responsibility of a  manager is "getting his hands dirty" and working side-by-side with the crew. Through training, coaching, setting expectations and above all, leadership, a professional manager leverages the skills of her staff to get the job done. A newly-minted manager might find himself spending 25-30 hours doing what he should be paying other people to do while still spending 40+ hours doing "manager stuff". Picking up after employees whose idea of personal boundaries is to refuse to do what they were hired to do, or constantly correcting errors by underperformers, simply because they're afraid of being shorthanded is a vicious circle that will never end. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIX

Managers - Part XXVII (Post Pandemic #2) - Maintaining Discipline and Morale

Many years ago I worked for a manager who virtually everyone viewed as a "good" manager. He had a winning personality, was pretty light on discipline and for the most part let everyone do their jobs as they saw fit. If you were getting your job done you'd certainly appreciate the absence of micromanaging and how insignificant deviations from policy were overlooked. And even two decades later, most people, would say he was a good manager, including the corporate hierarchy. The problem was that his happy-go-lucky attitude not only benefitted the employees who did their job well, but it also benefitted those who chose to flout the rules. Not only did he decline to micromanage the high performing employees, but the slackers benefited from his hands off management as well. 

In this particular business, everyone theoretically worked at least one weekend day. Hours would vary somewhat based on the customer flow on a given day, but 9-5, Monday-Friday schedules weren't supposed to happen. Except that they did. One particular department manager worked part-time hours, Monday-Friday, no weekends, no evenings, no holidays. She took smoke breaks at least every hour. We were required to take a 30 minute lunch break mid-shift if we were scheduled 7 hours or more per day; she was allowed to schedule herself for 6 hours and 59 minutes (and could be found in the break room fairly often regardless). Other managers noticed. 

The point is not that any of those things shouldn't have been allowed, but that for the rest of the managers, they weren't allowed and that it was noticed and that people grew resentful. 

So, post pandemic?

National unemployment is around 4%. Locally it's around 3%. As I laid out in Part XXVI - Post Pandemic #1 people are quitting jobs rather than put up with crap. The churn that has always existed has slowed down to where there's often a large time gap between a resignation and a replacement. So what does a manager do? What I've been hearing is that managers are ignoring what ordinarily would be unacceptable — coming in late, incomplete or inaccurate work, you name it. Managers are reasoning, that as tough as it is to find replacements, it's better to put up with a substandard worker than no worker at all. While I admit that in some situations this may be appropriate, but in most this would be dead wrong. Just like in my example about the "good" manager, employees notice when other employees are held to different standards but are earning the same pay rate. 

A few years ago I had a problem employee in the deli of the store that I managed. He was part of a three-person team that worked the evening shift. He was lazy, incompetent and kept wandering off to use his cell phone. after several warnings I informed him that he would be terminated if he used his phone while on the clock again. Before the shift was over he started texting right in front of me! We were shorthanded for the rest of the week. At the end of the week one of the two remaining evening shift workers remarked that they were getting more done faster than when they had three people on duty. The remaining crew appreciated that I had gotten rid of the weak link, even though that theoretically meant more work for them. By keeping people who are not doing the job, managers are risking alienating the high performing employees. 

The final point in this post is about managers who are simply afraid that they'll need to fill in, work extra hours, or are concerned that the skill needed to replace someone is a little rusty. I've been in this position a few times in my management career. Do I really have time to drive to Humboldt every morning and deliver those papers? Can I really get all my other responsibilities done if I have to run the Frozen Department? I encountered both of those in two different management positions. In both I put up with substandard work for a long time until I was forced to take over and found out it wasn't so bad! If you've read the rest of this series on management you'll know that my theory of management is that it isn't necessarily a manager's job to do things, to get in there with the troops and work side by side — it's a manager's job, by training, coaching and delegation, to get things done. But sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty until you can hire and train a replacement.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXVIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXVII - Paulianity

The New Testament is divided into several parts:

• The Gospels
• The Act of The Apostles
• Epistles
• The Apocalypse of John (aka Revelation)

The four Gospels are truncated biographies that focus on Jesus' ministry, with two giving information about his birth and youth. 

The Acts of the Apostles purport to follow the growth of Christianity following Jesus' Ascension. It focusses on Peter for about the first half and then switches the focus to Paul. It appears to be written by the author of the Gospel of Luke. 

The Apocalypse of John is a prophetic book that combines symbolic description of then current rulers with future events.

The Epistles are letters purportedly from Christian leaders to various churches, addressing specific issues that arose. Some are by the man we know as the Apostle Paul, others by someone claiming to be Paul. 

What's odd about what the early Church, and for that matter churches to this day, did with this information, is that the emphasis on doctrine and practice isn't what Jesus' is quoted in the Gospels as having taught, but what Paul wrote in his Epistles. 

Paul, despite being generally known as the Apostle Paul, was not one of the Twelve Apostles that we are introduced to in the Gospels. He never claims to have met Jesus. In fact, in his own writings he admits to having persecuted Christians. At some point, some 15-20 years after Jesus' death he had a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus and *poof* he changed his tune and became a Christian. Not just any Christian either. He traveled around preaching and founding churches all over the place. Then he started writing letters to these churches, addressing situations where he believed that they were deviating from what he taught them. (this was probably 20 years before the first Gospel that made it into the Bible, Mark, was written) Despite being a Johnny-come-lately he did not look to Jesus' actual companions, Peter and the boys, for information about what Jesus taught. He actually bragged about not receiving what he knew about Jesus from any human being, but by revelation from God. And what this heavenly oracle was telling him was that Gentiles could be "saved" without adhering to the Law of Moses, which was not what Peter and the others were teaching. 

So, the Gospels, which are reporting events that took place mostly around 30 CE, did not start being written until around 35 years later, the first of Paul's writings had already been around for around 20 years by this time. Was the Gospel of Mark written to debunk Paul? (Matthew and Luke were written around 20 years after Mark, by which time all of Paul's Epistles were in circulation) The Gospels for the most part, especially the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew and Luke) focus on behaviors, while Paul focusses on beliefs. Not that the Pauline Epistles teach that behavior, or works, are unimportant, but the emphasis is on what a person believes. 

There's a faction of Biblical scholars who believe that Jesus did not exist, and that the strongest indication of his nonexistence lies with Paul. Paul's entire theology rests upon a self-described vision, not any interaction with Jesus or his immediate circle. The argument against an historical Jesus based on Paul's writings suggests that the Twelve, if they existed, would not have a quiesced to a newcomer like Paul, especially a former enemy, taking the lead that he did while they all faded into obscurity.  It's certainly plausible, but it's not a theory that I agree with. 

Early Christianity, as I have recently written about, was a collection of competing Christianities, differing ideas and interpretation regarding what Jesus really taught. I don't think it's necessary to ascribe Paul's dominance to the absence of The Twelve, or of Jesus himself, despite his whole theology being based on unverifiable revelation. It's just as plausible in my opinion that the Pauline faction simply pushed out the Apostolic faction, especially if Peter and the others were adamant about remaining Jewish where Paul was opening the club up to everyone. He could have simply steamrolled over the Twelver faction, with remnants putting together the Gospels as a counterbalance and a reminder that Jesus was all about works, with the Gospels just getting absorbed by the 'faith trumps works' Paulists. 

At this 2,000 year remove it's impossible to say, but for a faith supposedly based on Jesus, they have built his church, not on his most enthusiastic follower, Peter, but on Paul, the one who basically hallucinated him. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 
 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXVI - Dispensationalism & Zionism & The Rapture (Oh My)

It wasn't very long ago that I explained dispensationalism in one of my articles, but I've been seeing social media posts connecting Zionism to Dispensationalism and the concept of a "Rapture". Many of these "debunk" Dispensationalism as a new, unbiblical doctrine and conclude that this undermines the whole concept of Zionism. 

Biblical Contradictions

Many Christians would take issue with the fact that the Bible contradicts itself, not to mention historical and archeological records. Many others simply ignore the contradictions — or don't know about them because they don't read the Bible. But from the very early days of Christianity theologians have been aware of contradictions and discrepancies and attempted to reconcile them. (I'm mainly dealing with how Christian theologians addressed inconsistencies, I am not very familiar with how Jewish scholars may have approached issues in the Jewish scriptures).

The question of the nature of Jesus Christ — was he God, or was he a man? — caused a lot of ink to be spilled in the theological battlefields of the early centuries of Christianity. Even when they thought they had an answer — he's both! — the minutia of how he could be both, as well as the ramifications of the various theories, occupied Christian leaders for centuries, when it could be argued that they certainly had better things to do. 

The problem that the Church Fathers identified was that there were sections of the Gospels and Epistles that very clearly indicated that Jesus was a man, a very holy man, a special man, but a man and not God. There were also other verses which just as clearly came down on the side of Jesus being God. These second century scholars had a choice: they could ignore the question and focus what Jesus preached and encourage people to follow his example and live their life as he taught; they could decide that Jesus being a man made more sense and interpret the verses that suggested that he was also God in that light; or place their bets on Christ's divinity and interpret the verses that said otherwise in that light. What they did was decide that Jesus was man and God. They argued interminably about the details, but ended up with the conclusion that he was fully God and fully man. That was the starting point for the doctrine of The Trinity, a theological edifice to explain away a contradiction — a Christology which cannot be found in any actual book of the Bible. (The nuances of that stance take up fat volumes — check it out some time). 

The God of the Jewish Bible (aka The Old Testament) vs. The God of Jesus

A very large plot hole in the Bible is the stark difference between how God is portrayed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (Other than the Apocalypse of John [aka Revelation] which reverts back to the wrathful, vengeful God imagery). In the 1800's there arose a theological position called Dispensationalism, which attempted to explain the differences. But long before that, Marcion, a Second Century Christian, came up with his own solution. Marcion took a blunt force approach to Biblical criticism and simply threw out the parts he thought made no sense. Observing that the vengeful God of the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the God of the Gospels he concluded that they were different gods. In Marcion's view, the Old Testament God was evil, while the New Testament God of Jesus was the "true" God, the good God. He threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John and the non-Pauline epistles and heavily edited what was left. Say what you want, but Marcion took care of those pesky contradictions!

Dispensationalism as an Answer to The Contradictions

Nineteenth Century Dispensationalists eschewed Marcion's approach. Rather than relegating the Old Testament God to second deity status, they arranged history as outlined in the Bible into a number of "dispensations". A dispensation, according to them, was a time period where God dealt with humanity in different ways from the other time periods. Even though Dispensationalism as a interpretative framework did not come about until the Nineteenth Century, it is predicated upon the observation that God appeared to act differently toward humans during different periods of history, which is clearly based on scripture. There was a time when God required his people to follow The Law of Moses, yet Paul wrote that Christians were not required to follow The Law. There was a time before The Law, and there will be a time after Christ returns when all the rules will be different. And Jesus was certainly following the Law of Moses, at least in spirit, if not in Pharisaic detail. How to reconcile all that? The answer was to theorize that since the rules obviously changed periodically, there was a need to demarcate those divisions. 

Scofield Reference Bible

Dispensationalism became popularized with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1900 by American Bible student Cyrus Scofield. It was innovative in that it included commentary in the margins, rather than in a separate volume as was the previous custom. In 1909, Anglican Minister E.W. Bullinger edited The Companion Bible, which was similar in its inclusion of notes and commentary, along with voluminous appendices. Both men were Dispensationalists and their commentary reflected this belief.

The Dispensations

Following is a common division of dispensations:

• Innocence/Original Paradise/Garden of Eden — Adam and Eve before eating from the Tree of Knowledge
• Patriarchal — before the Law was given
• Law — the giving of the Law to Israel
• Grace or Church — this started when the Law Dispensation ended and includes the present day
• Tribulation — starts with the rapture and includes all the horrors of the Book of Revelation
• Millennial — ends with Christ's return to defeat The Beast and The Devil and initiates the Thousand Year reign of Christ on Earth
• This is sometimes combined with either The Tribulation or Paradise Dispensations, 
• Paradise — establishment of God's eternal kingdom on earth 

There were usually seven of these time periods, although I have seen eight listed as well. Since these dispensations were the opinions and interpretations of the theologians who came up with them, there were different ways to divide them up. Here are a few of the other divisions from other groups:

• Conscience — after "The Fall" — no rules, people followed their own conscience, ended with The Flood
• Human Government — From Noah to Abraham
• Promise — starts with Abraham and indicates God dealing with one specific group of people — ends with Moses
• These three are often combined into one
• Jesus' Ministry — some recognized this as a separate Dispensation; some interpretations ended the Law at Jesus' resurrection, some at the beginning of his ministry, some at the ascension, other at the end of The Acts of the Apostles. 
• Part of The Law, at least definitely separate from the Church Dispensation

Despite there being disagreements among Dispensationalists on where these divisions should begin and end, the concept does have its own logic. There's no question that God acts differently throughout different time periods as outlined in the Bible. But there are no bright lines delineating changes in God's rules — if there were, there would be no disagreement among the various advocates of dispensationalism. You won't find the term in the Bible, but it's a legitimate interpretive framework.

Tribulation, The Anti-Christ and Other Hallucinations

The Apocalypse of John, also known as Revelation (not Revelations) is the final book of the Bible. It was not universally considered to be inspired scripture during the canonization process in the Fourth Century, and it was re-examined by Martin Luther. Luther questioned Revelation, as well as several other previously canonized books, but ultimately left the New Testament Canon intact. Objectively Revelation is a figurative commentary on then-current events, and has nothing to do with our times, or any other time in the future of the First Century CE. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals however, view it as prophetic, and a blow-by-blow description of how the world will end and be replaced by the Kingdom of God that Jesus thought was going to happen 2000 years ago.  

There are a few things that make it at least plausible as a prophecy of future events. One of these is Chapter 1, v7: "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.", which fits very well with First Thessalonians 4:15-17 "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord."

The other point is that the interpretation of chapters 20 and 21 makes the most sense as a description of events after the triumphant return of Christ. 

The Rapture

It's true that the concept of The Rapture is relatively new, it wasn't taught widely until the mid-1800's. But it does have a Biblical foundation, even without resorting to the acid trip that is the Apocalypse of John, aka The Book of Revelation. It's pretty clear from the Gospels, at least the Synoptics, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, i.e. he preached that the world as it was known was going to end, and God would inaugurate his Kingdom on Earth. Not at some hazy future time, but soon. He is quoted as saying that end would come before the current generation passed away. Paul, writing around 20 years later, and arguably writing toward the end of that generational countdown, thought it would happen soon as well. 2000 year old spoiler alert: it didn't happen. 

Within Paul's epistles he addresses the undeniable fact that it hadn't happened yet. He comforts those who were concerned that those who had died would miss out in First Thessalonians chapter 4 by describing those who had already died rising from the dead, followed by those still alive, to meet Jesus in the air. "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." First Corinthians chapter 15 gives additional information. Second Thessalonians chapter 2 addresses those who thought that the resurrection was spiritual and had already happened by stressing that it was still future, would be physical, and could not happen until a "great apostasy" took place. The great apostasy, or "falling away", as some translations render it, could conceivably be linked to the "Beast" of the Book of Revelation. 

As Paul grew older, with no sign of Jesus returning to gather the believers in the air, he started writing about his belief that a believer would be in God's presence immediately upon death. As the Catholic/Orthodox version of Christianity became the dominant, official, version, the canonical doctrine became that a believer would immediately be ushered into God's presence (or, if evil, to Hell) at death. The future resurrection was viewed, if at all, as a return of Jesus to herald the new heaven and new Earth. 

Dispensationalist End Times

Nineteenth Century Dispensationalist theologians combined the description of a resurrection in Paul's epistles with the events in Revelation and with various prophesies in the Old Testament to concoct a timeline of the end times. It eventually became an article of faith in Fundamentalist and Evangelical circles that a rapture of believers would be followed by a "tribulation" which would end with the triumphant return of Jesus, the last judgement and the ushering in of paradise. It's my opinion that the Rapture itself, even apart from the Book of Revelation, is a plausible interpretation of the New Testament doctrine regarding the fate of the dead, despite it being a relatively new theory. 

Zionism

The name Zionism comes from "Zion", the name of the mount upon which Jerusalem was built in Biblical times. It originated in the mid-1800's as a movement to create a national home for the Jewish people. Alternatives to Palestine were considered, but the consensus settled upon Palestine. The Ottoman Empire was still in control of Palestine at that time. Jews from other areas in Ottoman lands, as well as from Europe where Jews endured regular persecution, began to migrate to Palestine. Some Zionists had a religious motivation: to fulfil prophesies of the return of Israel to its ancestral land, others had purely political motivations — to secure a safe haven where Jews were in control. When the Ottomans lost in World War One, the United Kingdom took control of Palestine, which then included what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. The United Kingdom agreed to assist in the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people". Israel declared itself an independent state within the borders set by the United Nations in 1948. 

Christian Support For Zionism and the State of Israel

Even though the Jewish Zionists were not motivated by the Book of Revelation (even if some were spurred by Old Testament predictions of a return to their ancestral domain) the support they received from the United Kingdom was. Dispensationalism and the related End Times interpretation of the Book of Revelation had taken root within the upper echelons of U.K. government. They saw it as their Christian duty to facilitate Israel's return to The Holy Land. Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States military and financial support for Israel is based on some of the same assumptions. (It's ironic that many of these same cheerleaders for a Jewish state, nevertheless tend to be bigoted toward actual Jews.) 

Dispensationalism became a bedrock doctrine of American Evangelical and Fundamentalist Churches and explains a lot of the right wing support for Israel. The relevant scriptures that point to a re-establishment of Israel and The Temple are not found in Revelation however. References are scattered throughout the Old Testament: Ezekiel 37:21-25, Zechariah 14:2-4, Jeremiah 31: 31-34, and others refer to Israel and the Israelites returning to the Biblical lands. The implication of these verses is then read into the events of Revelation. 

Anti-Israeli Backlash

Recently, especially, but not exclusively, among progressives who support Palestine and decry the Israeli government's treatment of them, there has been a backlash. This reaction usually takes the form of denying that the modern State of Israel has anything to do with the Biblical Nation of Israel. This is often extended to include an assertion that the State of Israel is an illegal colonialist entity that has no right to exist. I'm not going to debate that issue here, but just as we shouldn't be conducting foreign policy based on the Bible, we shouldn't be doing so based on whether a country that clearly does exist, shouldn't exist based on a different Biblical opinion. In other words, our support for another nation should be predicated on our national interest, not whether that nation's existence fulfils a prophecy. Equally, scouring the Bible for reasons that a nation doesn't fulfill a Biblical prophecy, should not be a reason to abandon an ally. We shouldn't be using anyone's Holy Book to set national policy!

The movement to delegitimize Israel and our support for their war also includes denial of the legitimacy of Dispensationalist theology, including the Rapture. Opponents of Israel apparently believe that  debunking the interpretive legitimacy of Dispensationalist and Rapture theology undermines any rationale for our alliance with Israel. Their foundation is not particularly strong, Dispensationalism, which in my opinion has its weak points, can be justified Biblically. 

Antisemitism — An Offshoot Or Foundation of The Backlash?

An unfortunate side effect of all of this is a resurgence of Anti-Jewish bigotry, discrimination and persecution. Social media posts that I have seen attempting to discredit Dispensationalism often include the false assertion that the Scofield Reference Bible was "commissioned by the Rothschilds". Anyone who has paid attention to antisemitic tropes over the years knows that "The Rothschilds" is often shorthand for the conspiracy theory that powerful Jews are running the world through their alleged control of, among other things, banks, the media and government. No Rothschild had anything to do with the Scofield Bible. Another feature of the backlash is an insistence that the modern State of Israel has nothing in common with the Biblical Nation of Israel. This assertion is usually based on a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler theorized that Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. Jews from Eastern Europe as opposed to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews — from Spain and Egypt respectively) were descended from a Turkic Tribe that had converted to Judaism in the Eighth Century. Koestler claimed that this would remove the racial basis for discrimination and persecution against Jews. It had the opposite effect. It became a favorite of White Nationalists, the Christian Identity Movement, and Arabs who maintained that modern-day Jews had no ancestral claim to Palestine. 

Bottom Line 

It's complicated. I am not a Bible believer, and am firmly against basing our foreign policy on religious texts. But most of what you're reading on this subject is not true. There are plenty of reasons to be against our war with Israel against Iran, and many reasons to abhor Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but insisting that certain Biblical interpretations are wrong isn't one of them. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXVII

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVI - Sunk Costs

One of the things you learn in economics courses is the concept of "sunk cost". Most people don't understand it. Sunk cost is the money that you have "sunk" into a project or a purchase that you will never get back, no matter what you do. The sunk cost fallacy is when the money that you already spent becomes the justification for continuing to spend money, even though you really don't want or need to continue. An example would be sitting through a terrible movie because you already paid for the ticket; or you paid for repairs for your junk car last month, and it needs repairs again, so instead of getting rid of this money pit of a car, you keep repairing it, not wanting to "waste" the money you already spent; or holding on to an asset that in all likelihood will never again be worth what you paid for it because you don't want to "lose" money by selling it for less than the purchase price. In all of these examples the money for the movie ticket, for the car repairs, for the purchase of the asset has already been spent in the past no matter what you do in the present. It's gone. 

My point of view regarding my involvement in The Way International was very much a sunk cost fallacy. There were red flags aplenty, many reasons why my involvement was a bad idea, but I had rationalized that I had put so much time and effort into it, that it wouldn't make sense to back out. I had completely changed my religious world view, I had antagonized my family and abandoned my friends, I had quit college and moved halfway across the country to participate in a program that turned out to be a joke, I had seen people who supposedly were Godly leaders seriously falling short of even the most basic of expectations, yet here I was, signing up for another year of commitment to this sketchy organization, and not only that, I was taking the first steps to joining their so-called leadership training program, a lifetime commitment. If I had made all of those big moves, I "reasoned", why wouldn't I want to double down and not "waste" the time and preparation I had invested so far. 

One thing that is clear in retrospect, but I wouldn't admit to myself back then, was that I simply didn't want to admit to everyone who thought that getting involved in The Way was a bad idea, that it was a bad idea. 

So here I was, now in a "Way Home" in Lincoln Nebraska. There were no restrictions on how many hours I could work, or a minimum number of hours I was required to "witness" every week, I could travel to visit family  — in short, none of the formal strictures that defined the WOW Ambassador program. But there was still an expectation that the Way leadership had first call on my time. If there was a meeting, I was required to attend, if there was a class, I was required to participate; the whole purpose of the home in which I lived was to serve the needs of the Way hierarchy. One of the first things that I noticed was that things were conducted much more formally than I had grown used to. In New York, which was one of the first areas to experience large numerical growth in the seventies, the wide spread of fellowships had outpaced the ability of Way headquarters to staff them with Way Corps graduates, or even Way Corps students. This resulted in a very organic leadership structure, largely free of a lot of egotism or central control. In Sidney, isolated as we were from other Way people in the state, we were similarly informal in our activities. But the state leader of The Way had graduated from the Way Corps several years earlier, and was in his third year as Limb (state) Coordinator. Branch, and even home fellowship, meetings were highly structured, and lacked the spontaneity that I came to expect. Despite my initial resistance to this approach, I became somewhat enamored of it myself and began to enjoy being "the leader", the local "Man of God" after I had been appointed Twig Leader of a small fellowship. 

One of the things that was always at the forefront of the minds of Way leaders was outreach and growth. The way these things were measured was twofold: running PFAL classes and "splitting" twigs. PFAL classes I have discussed before. If your twig fellowship could find seven or more people to take the class, you were outreach heroes. It really didn't matter much if the class graduates wandered away afterward, the important thing was that we had run a class. Splitting a twig indicated that you had too many people to comfortably participate in a home fellowship and that you had enough to start up a new fellowship in another home. When I arrived in Lincoln, there were six or seven home fellowships as part of the Lincoln branch and a similar number in Omaha, with a few isolated twigs in smaller towns around the state. Around halfway through the year Rev. Ronnie, our state leader, decided to split all the fellowships. Now we had double the numbers of twig fellowships, double the numbers of leaders, but not double the number of people. This became an issue the following year when the new incoming state leader discovered that the Lincoln Branch and the Lincoln Twig Area (basically a half-size branch) didn't contain ten thriving fellowship requiring two Way Corps overseers, but four feeble little home fellowships. 

An issue, however, that was to cause problems before the ministry year was out was that a lot of us were young people (I had just turned 23) and been (mostly) celibate for the previous year. There was an overabundance of young, single people looking for boyfriends and girlfriends, and along with that, sex. This reality, coupled with The Way's hypocritical and inconsistent views on pre-marital sex and even dating, was going to result in a big change in my relationship with The Way.

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XXVI - The End of Retail

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 I had survived, barely, five months of excruciating uncertainty, but it wasn't the only problem. Tim, the Assistant Store Director, had applied for an  ASD position in another store and was moving to the Super Saver at 48th & O. Right around the holidays! If I remember correctly I was able to keep him for Thanksgiving, but he would be gone by Christmas. I had to hire and train a new ASD. Right around this time Susie's doctor found a tumor in her eye and had to have surgery to remove it. While she was in Iowa City recovering from surgery I had to drive back to Lincoln to conduct interviews. I don't recall who was handling HR duties at the time, but I had that person set up interviews, one after the other, on a Saturday. I believe I interviewed eight or nine candidates. Like HR Coordinators, Assistant Store Director openings usually attracted people with little to no qualifications for the job, mainly because no one really knew what they did. Of all the people I interviewed I considered only two to be qualified. One was Todd, my Night Manager, but he declined after I offered him the position (why do people do that?). My second choice was Jamie, who had been the Assistant Grocery Manager when I was at Pine Lake. 

Jamie was very rough around the edges. There had been several complaints about him from other employees, but Nick, our old Store Director, and I always tried to see beyond the gruff exterior — he was a misfit, just like the rest of my crew at Van Dorn! But I remembered how Jamie was able to motivate the grocery clerks at Pine Lake. Grocery clerks are typically the laziest bunch of anyone in any store, but he was able to turn them into a productive team. I could always count on him to follow through on assignments and come up with out-of-the-box solutions to problems. Since the position would combine that of Grocery Manager, I thought, given his grocery experience, that he'd be ideal. I sold the idea of promoting Jamie to my supervisor, District Manager Scott Ruth, who was on board, but when I checked with corporate HR about what pay rate he could be offered, they reacted as if I was planning on hiring Satan...or Pete Hegseth. Ah yes...Jamie had the HR target on his back. Around the same time the Assistant Store Director at 66th & O Russ's had quit suddenly — remember, we're right around the holidays. Tim (not my former ASD, but the Tim who turned down my offer the previous year to be Front End Manager/Human Resources Coordinator) was helping out and somehow impressed Scott Ruth, who recommended to me that we bring him on board as ASD, which we soon did. The problem was that Tim had absolutely no experience in grocery. We sent him out to a few other stores to get trained by experienced Grocery Managers and ASDs, but he was still pretty green going into Christmas week. Looks like it's time for another Pat Raybould story.

It was probably about a week before Christmas, on a Sunday. I had decided that after working with New Tim in the morning I would turn him loose to manage the store solo for the first time that the afternoon. I gave him a to-do list, which included restocking the Christmas candy display. About 30 minutes after I left, Pat showed up. Without checking in with Tim he found a pallet of Christmas candy in the back room and brought it out to the holiday aisle. He then spent some time berating Tim for the display not being full. Then he began the great fruitcake fruit hunt. For those who don't make their own fruitcake, grocery stores stock the dried cherries, pineapple, apricots and citron (nobody really knows what citron is, but we carried it anyway), but they hardly sell any. You usually can find a stack of it marked down in January. If you sold out you considered yourself lucky and didn't try to procure any more. Pat wandered over to the Christmas baking display and noticed that there was no fruitcake fruit. He started asking employees where the fruitcake fruit was. Of course since none of them, like meat cutters, produce clerks and floral department employees, had anything to do with stocking these items, not to mention the fact that we were out, no one could tell Pat where the fruitcake fruit was. Tim tried to tell him that we were out. Pat couldn't believe that was true and embarked on a quest through the back room to find the fruitcake fruit. Of course he didn't find any, because we were out, and happy about it. The next day he called Scott Ruth and told him to tell me to get more fruitcake fruit in the store. I got some from one of the other stores and didn't sell even one unit and had to mark them all down after Christmas. 

At some point during the year new Tim was transferred to another store and Bill, an experienced ASD came to my store. I was also given permission to hire a Grocery Manager. For once I thought that the corporate executives actually wanted the store to succeed. I was wrong. There were a lot of hints that the store was going to close. The barely functioning air conditioning unit that required a sprinkler on the roof to keep it cool, the stinky drain that should have been dug up and repaired, the department managers who were being transferred out one at a time. But it was all confirmed one evening when an email that was only supposed to go to the corporate executive committee went out to all Store Directors and Assistant Store Directors. It clearly stated that the store was closing soon and a date needed to be set. News travels fast. Scott Ruth came out to our store and met with all the managers and lied to them, that the store wasn't closing. Bill and I kept our mouths shut. 

At some point I got another visit that didn't bode well. Tom Schulte, Operations VP, was accompanied by Donna, the corporate HR Director. They had with them a pile of printouts from my Facebook page. I had made a comment that they didn't think was appropriate, and others had made further comments that escalated the perceived inappropriateness. Someone from B&R had seen these comments and reported me to corporate. I was written up again, and had to attend counseling sessions through our employee assistance program. This is when I realized how much of a target I had on my back and how closely my actions were being scrutinized. At my counseling sessions the counselor brought up incidents from years in the past that I thought had been resolved and forgotten. I was on thin ice with B&R. Nothing is ever forgotten. 

The incident that I am sure was the one where they decided I would be fired came in the Autumn of the year. Two customers, friends of one of my managers, wanted to getting married in the store. This was something that I always thought would be cool — the Store Director officiating a wedding in the grocery store! They ended up buying their flowers and wedding cake at the store, as well as a lunch for them and their witnesses. Melissa, who was in charge of promoting store events on our internal social media site, took photos and posted them. Soon after I received a call from Donna telling me to take down the photos of the wedding. She claimed that she had received complaints from several of my peers and at least one store employee. The complaints were supposedly that I was doing personal business on store time, but in reality they were about the fact that it was two women getting married. This was confirmed for me when Donna mentioned that the internal employee called the wedding an abomination. I took the photos down, but once again, a meeting that involved Donna took place. I was criticized for doing the wedding on my 15-minute break, but Donna maintained that since I still had my nametag on, I was really still "on the clock". I was criticized for leaving 30 minutes early at the end of the day (I left the Assistant Store Director in charge and left early since I had not taken a lunch break.) Donna maintained that since I was in the Deli area for the wedding, that indicated that I had taken my lunch break. (Which is it Donna? Was I on the clock or on my lunch?). I was written up again, although for some reason it was worded as an extension of the Performance Improvement Plan from the previous year. I was told that I had a track record of making bad decisions and if another problem arose I would be fired — no further discussion involved.

I believe that the real reason for me being in this level of trouble was the same-sex wedding, but I guess they didn't want to be on record for firing me for that reason. I knew that there was no chance that nothing would ever come up which they could use as a pretext to get rid of me. I was not wrong. Not long after this Bill and I observed a cashier having a long conversation with a customer while a line was forming. I went over to ask what was going on and was yelled at by the customer, who ended up elbowing me in the ribs as he left the store. I followed him outside and took a photo of his license plate, thinking I should maybe call the police (I ended up deciding against it). He called the corporate office to complain. I never found out what he said, but a week later I was fired. 

During that week Scott Ruth avoided talking to me and would not return my calls. The day before a scheduled vacation we had what was called a "Holiday Show" at one of the other stores. This was a day where we were trained on how the corporate executives wanted us to merchandise our stores for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I went through the whole day, until at the very end Scott said he wanted to talk to me before I left for vacation. Then he and Donna fired me. 

Even though being unemployed was not something that I looked forward to, it was obvious for a long time that the situation wasn't going to get better. Even if I hadn't been fired, with the store closing I doubt that I would still have had a job. In similar situations managers were forced to apply for open positions. I was actually happy that I was fired. The pressure was off, the other shoe had dropped. 

I was fired on Thursday October 29, 2015. I took the weekend off and made job hunting my job. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XXVII