Managerial conflict
After the fiasco that led to my husband taking a month off for his mental health, he started working for Panera Bread. He helped open several new locations in and around Summit County, Ohio. It was a good place to work, with delicious food. We loved the pastries he brought home. I loved chocolate croissants. Once he had learned a new menu and new locations, he started taking classes from the University of Akron. He took MBA classes on specific nights each week, keeping the other nights available for the restaurant.
We lived in a multi-cultural area. One of the urban grocery stores had carts that required a quarter to unlock. We frequently met young boys who offered to return carts to the store in exchange for keeping the quarter. Our eldest son attended one year of public school with a mixed group; his pale skin and white-blond hair made him stand out, along with his short, slight frame. There were children in his kindergarten class who had been held back twice, two years older than him.
My husband hired all sorts of people, and kept them as long as they cheerfully showed up and did good work. At one point the franchise owner came to his restaurant, and was waited on by a black employee. Afterwards the owner pulled my husband aside and told him Never to let someone like that work the front line again. My husband felt terrible. When he told me what had happened, my husband nearly cried in frustration. “That’s one of my best employees!” he said.
Another time his chief assistant manager, a gay man, returned from two weeks of vacation to say he had taken another job and would not be back. My husband did weep then. He felt betrayed, sad, yet understanding that his friend had chosen more pay and/or better conditions elsewhere.
The last straw for restaurant work was when someone in the franchisee’s HR department decided that managers must be available 24/7. No more night classes. My husband felt it was a personal conflict taken to an extreme, but regardless, it meant leaving Panera Bread. His MBA was more important.
