The trouble is generally thought to have started when we missed the nougat craze of the mid 90's because management, frankly, didn't know how to spell it and they thought it was too "French". Then there was the great chocolate covered prune debacle of 2004, and sales further suffered during the Great Recession. Things finally came to a head in 2010 during a meeting of the board when CEO Mr. Smithington, son of founder Hunter Smithington, looking like an old pale frog in a suit at the head of the table, spoke and said that way back when he was a kid the Newport News Candy Factory made things had "zip, zing, and pep. We should do that again, get back to our roots. I want something with pep!"
And thus Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were born.
They were little chewable candies that looked liked peppers. The "pep" came from a bit of caffeine that was laced into candy. We might have pulled it off except for two small problems:
1. Mr. Smithington demanded that they be licorice flavored. Now, it is true that Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were not necessarily made with children in mind, but rather for the more sophisticated professional on the go who might do with a nip of caffeine but doesn't have the time or the inclination to grab a cup of coffee or a latte mochachinomiamio; unfortunately, studies show that 7 out of 10 sophisticated professionals agree that licorice tastes like shit. When confronted with that scientifically verifiable fact Mr. Smithington defiantly declared that he had been making candies since Marlene Dietrich grew tits; that no one had sold more candy than him on the Eastern Seaboard; that candy was what he knew and the bunch of smart-ass college kids from New York who did the study don't know jack. People love licorice and that's that. So we went with it.
2. The ad campaign floundered. Mr. Smithington was a great lover of the arts, and he wanted to include some of his favorite paintings in the campaign. These two spots ran in prominent magazines all over the nation:
All well and good I suppose; but then there was this ill-advised doosie that ran in Playboy:
The blogosphere went ape-shit with stories about how the company was being run by a bunch of backward looking, misogynistic old fuddy-duddies who laughably still thought that people actually read Playboy magazine, when all bloggers know that print is dead. Even the 30 percent of sophisticated professionals who actually love licorice wouldn't be caught dead with a box of Mr. Pippen's Peppy Pepper Poppers for fear of being "un-cool", "not-hip", "not-with-it", "not-down-with-the-whole-women's-lib-thing".
The board voted to clean house. Mr. Smithington went to spend the rest of this days in his large house overlooking the James River supplied with all the licorice his vast fortune could buy, and he died on a Tuesday. Some say it was of a broken heart; others say it was probably licorice poisoning, a deadly disease that claims one life every 5 years in the United States alone.
Of immediate concern was raising worker morale in an age of stagnant wages and diminishing benefits. We basically ended up with two choices:
Choice number one centered on Employee Engagement. We'd bring in Gallup and get them to deliver their patented Q12 survey and management would fix our leaky roofs and buy us ping-pong ball tables and bring in former astronauts to inspire us about our mission and offer yoga classes and have engineers sitting at their desks on hoppity-hops (or is it hippity-hops??) and we'd all band together every Thursday and sing kum-bay-yah.
OR, for the same cost, we could feed every employee in the company a hot dog per day for the next 13 years, and that included weekends.
The hot dog lunch idea was intriguing. It would show the employees that management cares by offering them a free lunch. Without having to worry about what to have for lunch at work people would actually show up on time because they weren't busy trying to pack their lunches at the last minute. On the flip side, health care costs for the labor pool, their bodies subjected to a daily dose of low quality frankfurters, would undoubtedly rise. Yet again, on the other hand, with cancer being the main risk of daily hot dog consumption, the policy would have the morbid side benefit of making early retirement buyouts unnecessary.
"No," said Sandra Moynaham, the VP in charge of making the decision. "If the press even thought we were thinking like that, they'd have a field day. It's bad enough as it is that we don't make the campus tobacco free."
In the end, the added health care costs were too steep to support the daily hot dog lunch, and upper upper management figured it would just be another entitlement the union would demand to keep. In the immortal words of the not so immortal licorice lover Mr. Cyrus Smithington, "You give 'em 13 years of anything, you might as well give 'em 100".
So we all took the Q12 quiz. We found out, based on the level of disagreement with the statement "I have a best friend at work", that we really don't like each other very much. We all decided to remedy that by having a series of events that would bring us all together, were we could share our stories and our thoughts on what truly matters in life.
What possibly could bring everyone together in such a way??
Food. Food brings people together in just that way.
And thus, the daily Newport News Candy Factory Hot Dog Lunch was born.
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