Chapter 20: Anne

Anne was an hour outside the main office of Uber-World (the ultimate one stop shop). She had stolen the ice cream truck the night before, and had excavated the remains of Sam Paulson (the founder of Uber-World) that evening. She had exchanged (in a sort of shell game) the license plate of an ice cream truck onto the license plate of a police car, the license plate of the police car onto the license plate of  a manager of Uber-World, the managers license plate onto the vans license plate, the vans license plate onto the C.E.O. of Uber-World, and finally the C.E.O.'s license plate onto another ice cream truck (The ice cream truck which currently held the remains of Sam Paulson  the founder and first C.E.O. of Uber-World, along with a myriad of other American made products).   She slid on her plastic smiley face mask and she was ready. This was it, the final statement. Nothing had done up to this point had been so poignant.  Not even her last “art” project could hold up to this.

 

In the early 2000’s Uber-World had set its dominance. It truly represented the American dream.  It had gone from a local American owned and operated grocery store to a world power.  At first progress was slow ( Uber-World only building in underdeveloped low income areas with a population of less than 30,000)  however after good ol’ Sam had died and the company had been successfully taken over by his children. One of the first thing that the children did was hire a team of efficiency experts. It was realized that the number one source of loss for the company was in fact the employees. While Sam had always believed the best way to have happy customers was to have happy employees, the computer realized that by paying all employees a living wage you would lose up to a third of your profit. So the Paulson children went on a campaign to stop losses. They removed all employee benefit programs, insisted that everyone including manager accept minimum wage, removed any chance of unionization (via a 3 hour “training” video) ,and introduced the concept of “time theft” *. This increased the company’s profits almost immediately. It was shortly after this that the Paulson’s realized (through the help of efficiency analysis), that the company was losing a lot of money by selling American made products. It was realized that the profit margin for products made produced and sold from foreign countries for one tenth the price, would in fact improve the bottom line, not to mention give them an edge on their competitors (and move them one step closer to the American dream of independence). Ron Paulson ( Sam’s Second son)  took this a step further by cutting out the middle man and directly owning, or having exclusive contracts with several overseas sweatshops, something no other corporation (at the time) had dreamed of doing, thus allowing Uber-World to offer  the lowest prices( by at least 15cents), with the lowest cost, and securing their place of dominace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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*    “time theft” refers to the time an employee waste by using the restroom ,talking, breathing, thinking or otherwise existing while they are being paid by the company to work. The concept is that since the company is paying you to make them money any activity that does not result in them making money while they are paying you constitutes as form of theft. A great amount of time and energy is spent on convincing employees that this or any other kind of theft is not only grounds for termination, prosecution, and bad things happening (not to mention hell), but results in you being a horrible un employable person, an absolute scumbag , the type of person no one likes or trust, the type of person who might say.. join a union (the other big Uber-World no no.)