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Toledo Talk   (musing about Lake Erie West and beyond)
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COSI Emplyees Have a Choice

This quote from today's Toledo Blade gives the "Hobson's choice" for COSI's employees: "After the hour-long session, no exact date was set, with Mr. Waterman explaining that it will depend, in part, on whether the staff favor receiving modest severance pay to tide them over while they seek new jobs or are willing to go with less to keep the doors open longer."

What would you do? I would take the money, and run. Of course, there are some employees who are believers in a social ideal, and would stay until the very end. How does severance pay affect unemployment?

created by oldsendbrdy on Nov 09, 2007 at 10:24:16 am     Comments: 5

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Comments ... #

I don't thing that the extent to which an employee stays is about a social ideal. I think it is about their confidence in and loyalty to the mission. If they think they can all work together to keep the boat floating, they will stay. The level of loyalty and confidence they have is whatever has been instilled in them by management.

If management has bred a culture that is based on the idea that it can't work unless the customers are forced to pay by law well, then, I guess the employees may not have alot of confidence since the vote went down.

But if management has bred a culture that is based on the idea that we can draw more people on their own free will if we entice them with products A, B and C - now lets build those products and get them out there - maybe they would have more confidence.

posted by babbleman on Nov 09, 2007 at 10:38:18 am     #



And going further with the idea of a mission, what kind of life is it to have it be a foregone conclusion that your work is not valued enough by others to support it, therefore they must be forced to subsidize it anyway.

What are you working for then? What gets you up each morning in that environment?

Collectivism is just so wrong on so many levels.

posted by babbleman on Nov 09, 2007 at 10:54:31 am     #



So, when it comes to what it takes to keep COSI afloat (on its own merits - not via taxation) there have been a number of comments about mismanagement. I have no idea what level of mismanagement there might have been but, to some extent, EVERY business is mismanaged. The extent to which a business is mismanaged combined with how much the business can be mismanaged before it fails is the key.

But another issue is simply the size of the market. I, for instance, have always been a huge fan of WXRT in Chicago. I have always recognized that a station with programming that eclectic would never exist in Toledo because there just aren't enough people with that taste. That taste occurs in a population at a certain rate. So say that XRT lover's occur at the rate of 2%. And say the population of Toledo is 500,000. That means there are 10,000 XRT lovers in Toledo. And say the population of Chicago is 5,000,000. That means there are 100,000 XRT listeners in Chicago.

So what if, even at 100% management excellence, the mininum number of listeners required to keep XRT on the air is 30,000?

What it means is that Chicago will have XRT and Toledo won't. End of story.

Same thing with COSI. The level of good management aside, there will need to be a minimum number of patrons in the population to make it happen. So you can either try to increase the general population assuming a constant rate of frequency of your patrons. Or you can try to increase the rate of frequency assuming a constant population. Or you can do both.

But it is entirely possible the number of people required and what they will pay is beyond all reasonable efforts within this population.

So now that I have once again totally hijacked a thread, this goes back to something I said in another thread. The economy has to grow first and then things like COSI will be the fruit. You cannot sap the available energy of the existing economy to force it to have fruit that it is not big enough to have and then, with that totally unnatural burden, expect it to grow.

posted by babbleman on Nov 09, 2007 at 11:11:03 am     #



I have to agree, babbleman, there is no way that something like COSI could exist in Toledo at the present time. There isn't the right kind of clientele. They depended on state money to "prime the pump". It is a case of (like Portside) people will be saying "Remember when...". I think things will get worse before they get better. I am just waiting for First Solar to relocate to somewhere more "rational".

posted by oldsendbrdy on Nov 09, 2007 at 11:17:23 am     #



Babbleman said: "What it means is that Chicago will have XRT and Toledo won't. End of story."

No, Babs: The end of the story is that Neo-Communists will take over the local government and drain the treasury to fund their personal whims. This is still happening in Detroit. Detroit being a collapse in progress, we in Toledo only have to look north to see Toledo's future.

As the financial sensible people give up in disgust and move out of Toledo, the financially stupid ones remaining will eventually use Democracy to trump finance. It's only a matter of time before the Neo-Communists out-number the real Americans around here, and put COSI on the public tit. Then the flight of sensible people will accelerate.

Moving to Perrysburg looks better with each passing year, since (1) it's prosperous, and (2) it's not Toledo, and most importantly (3) the Neo-Communists running Toledo can't use Unigov to capture Perrysburg.

posted by GuestZero on Nov 10, 2007 at 01:06:03 pm     #