S.A. Barton

I run a corporate consulting firm that specializes in small businesses, and I've dealt with more dysfunctional owners like this than I care to remember. I can tell you EXACTLY what's going on here. This guy had HALF his competent workforce walk off the job, can’t retain new hires even after doubling wages, and the workers who do stick around can’t even clean a fish tank without causing thousands of dollars in damages. And his conclusion is that an entire generation is unemployable?! Complete and utter nonsense. I can practically guarantee that if I sat down with the employees who quit, it wouldn't even take five minutes to figure out why they all left: An arrogant, insufferable, Boomer tyrant who treats his employees like garbage, blames everyone else for his own failures, and has created such a miserable working environment that anyone with two functioning brain cells and another employment opportunity immediately slams the eject button. Which, incidentally, explains why the only employees he can retain are apparently too stupid to tie their own shoes. The most incredible part is that this guy thinks offering $35 an hour somehow vindicates him. Do you have any idea how thoroughly you have to screw up as an employer to make $73,000 a year CLEANING FISH TANKS sound like a bad deal? And rather than engage in even a moment of self-reflection, he takes to X, publicly announcing that everyone who has ever worked for him is a lazy, incompetent moron. I cannot imagine why people don’t want to work for this man. I've got news for you, pal, and you might want to pay attention because I normally charge $400 an hour for this: When everyone who has the ability to leave your business does so, and the only people left are the ones nobody else will hire, it isn’t an employee problem. It’s a YOU problem. And the fact that you apparently had to shut down an otherwise profitable business before figuring that out tells me everything I need to know about why you had no business running one in the first place.