El Pollo Loco: Why Most Don't Deserve $8 an Hour (Jan 3, 2008)

But for some places that pay minimum wage, they don't deserve more than $2 an hour.

Take the case of an El Pollo Loco restauraunt franchise in San Diego.

Why is it that everytime I go to this place at the address below, I am never greeted in a friendly tone. I'm always getting order takers who just don't know how to be polite. Most of them are basically prejudiced against me for what I look like and base it on what I am, which is completely wrong for them to think that way.

Here's is the restaurant in question. Please register your complaints to the management of the premises if you've been treated rudely or coldly:

El Pollo Loco  	 
6121 Mission Gorge Road
SAN DIEGO, CA 92120 	 
Phone: (619) 584-1348 Fax: 619 584-1484

Just yesterday, I wrote the corporate website to complain about my recent experience.

I went to El Pollo Loco to purchase an item with a coupon and the receipt with $1 off, but the clerk told me I couldn't use the $1 off, so I left the place and went to another restauraunt.

I don't know if you keep track, but the people at that location are horribly rude and discoureous. In the past month, they never greet me or thanked me for doing business, were preoccupied with their own thoughts, and are sometimes forgetting to return my change.

I wish that your company would overhaul the management and staff and hire friendlier people who treat me like a human being instead of just a buck.

Now, how many places do you frequently visit that have hired clerks and order takers who don't value you as a human being? Are they worth even the $8 an hour that they're earning for being rude to customers?

I not only went to another restaurant, but I went to another El Pollo Loco franchise to order what the Mission Gorge restaurant didn't have: seven pieces of chicken for $5. I tried to order that, but some clerk kept telling me that they didn't have the deal. I pointed to the window where the sign said "7 pieces for $5.99", then she rang up another deal "11 pieces for $7.99" or whatever, and I kept trying to correct this order taker who was overpaid to misunderstand English, but she kept telling me that I wanted somethign else. Finally, the manager came over and completed the order correctly, and when my food was ready, another clerk thanked me and told me to enjoy my meal.

Now that's how you save a customer. I was at the one on Gennessee Avenue north of Balboa Avenue. The girl behind the counter needs to learn English and how to read signs, and she's getting paid $8 an hour to get my order wrong, while another at a different location is paid $8 an hour to be discourteous? What the hell is going on there?

This leads me to conclude that some unskilled workers are basically overpaid and are making $8 an hour to be rude and not understand English. Maybe the minimum wage is too high. Maybe there should be a sub minimum wage for unskilled workers who are inexperienced in dealing with customers who have money to spend on their competetors when the overpaid clerk can't get a customer's order right.

The raising of the minumum wage to $8 an hour Tuesday caused some customers at some places to balk and not understand why the prices went up. Truth is that businesses have to raise the prices to pay for the workers, and pass the price increases to the customer, including me. I have to pay more money to pump gas into my econobox, get some Taquitos at 7/11, get an Asian salad as Jack in the Box, shop for groceries at Wal-Mart, and other places because the minimum wage went up, and I'm making minimum wage myself.

I'm figuring that the gain I received in the increase in my hourly wages have been erased when the places I do business with also raised their prices. It won't be long before the San Diego Union-Tribune has to increase the cost of their paper to 60 cents a day, while reducing the sports and business sections to four pages apiece, and replacing the veteran journalists with minumum wage hacks to write the articles. It won't be long when the days of three pizza for $5 each can't be offered anymore, 99 cent items at fast food burger places can't be offered anymore, and so forth. Everybody is going to pay more money to do business with companies that employ minimum wage workers.

Just 27 years ago, the minumum wage was $3.35 an hour, while the price of gasoline per gallon hovered 1/3 of the hourly wage. Nowadays, the cost of gas at $3.30 a gallon is 2/5ths of the way to $8 an hour.

My monthly health premium went up from $200 to $240 a month. Is Kaiser hiring mostly minimum wage workers now? This is where the price of a service is way too high.

The cost of housing in San Diego is way over $200,000 for a house, and that's just too bad. They're building homes too big and on lots too large. I expect a house worth $500,000 to be a quarter the size of the late Aaron Spelling's mansion, not a lousy 1,000 square foot cube in Linda Vista!

The minimum wage keeps going up because the cost of the needs are too high, and they should be addressed. Raising the minimum wage higher and higher only results in the firing of the unskilled workers who can't learn the basics of human relations (I hope, but in El Pollo Loco's case, it wasn't), the relocation of doing business in another state with cheaper wages, outsourcing services to cheaper contractors (imagine Papa John's outsourcing its delivery drivers to another company to save expenses), and the higher anger of the consumer who can't understand why the price of an large pizza with everything costs $27.

Then, there's the doctor who I won't name, but he works at the Mary Birch Hospital For Women delivering babies and complains about the price of pizza being so high. In his case, he's the one who's out of order. He's the one who's being greedy and discourteous, not understanding that he's gotten a bargain when he saw it. He's making a lot more money an hour than the pizza delivery driver who was stiffed after paying $100 for ten large pizzas, three of them with five toppings on it, and was using five coupons for "buy one-get one free" with the order! He's gotten a steal worth $180 regular price, and he's complaining about it. He may be skilled and worth half of the salary he's earning, but he's a moron when it comes to understanding that other professionals have to make money too including pizza delivery drivers. Think twice before having this person there deliver your baby. Maybe he was dropped on his head when he was born.

Maybe $8 an hour for the baby delivery man is too high for this creton. He should be working at El Pollo Loco instead.

Now I ask this question to you. Have you been treated rudely by a business regardless of type and whether they're service jobs or high-end professionals? You tell me!