scarcity value
How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
131–140 of 279 posts
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep - many, if not most, factories staff these positions themselves. It fits in with their existing maintenance, assembly, cleaning, warehouse type roles. It's mainly white collar places that don't know how, or don't want to, hire anyone who does blue collar work.
Part of the reason white collar firms outsource is that benefits usually need to be uniform across all employees. If you are a white collar firm with generous benefit packages, it becomes comparatively expensive to hire blue collar workers yourself compared to outsourcing. Decent health insurance (~$20K/year) is more than the federal minimum wage ($14.5K/year). I'm not suggesting this is moral, but it is reality. At…
That's not true. You can offer better packages for your higher paid employees.
Outsourcing blue collar labor has to do with offering any benefits at all. Once your company has 50 employees or more, you must offer at least a bare minimum health insurance plan to all full time employees.
Outsourcing is cheaper, because you can deal with small companies that are more focused on taking advantage of employees by doing things like making sure no one works more than 30 hours a week.
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#133Another way this story could have ended: CEO: Thanks for the idea! Goodbye, and don't forget your mop! (CEO shares go up by $20M) Janitor: Damn, I should have brought a lawyer. If only I had the money for one.
You could be like Peter Roberts, who invented the quick release on wrenches:
https://apnews.com/article/aed4a37bc719aba52db82cb96029fded#....
He did eventually win his lawsuit though. 20 YEARS later.
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually came to post this. After noticing some weird terminology in the Twitter thread (I've never heard the term "Cucamonga Valley" used to refer to the neighborhood by Ontario International Airport) I found that hustle.co article which has very similar wording. I think the Twitter thread is just a paraphrasing with some jazzed up details
> paraphrasing That’s a generous way to say plagiarism IMO. Link should probably be updated to this (@dang?). Plus it avoids the abomination that is long form text mutilated into a thousand tweets.
Especially since on Twitter it could be summarised as "Janitor introduced flaming cheetos to CEO and it made the company xxx dollars"..
God damn attention-seeking content-stealing Twitterers..
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
[opinion to follow, my own] Even in 2020, while the rich get richer (literally being subsidized by COVID "relief" bills) and the poor are looking to avoid being evicted, the flood of pro-corporate defenders is never ending. It is a true downside to having such a large, albeit fragile middle-class. The fundamental premise of this story is flawed given how most board/c-suite positions are attained and how almost all we…
The fundamental premise of this story is flawed given how most board/c-suite positions are attained and how almost all wealth is acquired e.g. inherited. Citation needed. From a simple google search it seems 55.8% of Billionaires are "self-made" [1]. Sure some of them started off with silver spoons (i.e. Gates) but they did not inherit the billions they made from starting companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, etc.…
Wealth accumulation is exponential so starting with "mere millions" is deceptive. The first million is the hardest.
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, TIL I'm a fucking hero for being a decent human being who's open to new ideas. See, if the CEO had told him to fuck off, that would have been typical, subhuman behavior by someone who sees another human as beneath him. No, that CEO doesn't get a pat on the back for doing what anyone with an ounce of empathy would do in the same situation, especially because he presumably introduced the "act like an owner" initi…
You are clearly very anti-CEO, despite preaching to "be a decent human". If it was the janitor's boss who made $7/hour that listened to the janitor then you would have no problem patting him on the back. But because it's the CEO that did it you refuse to. Your bias is showing.
You're making a lot of assumptions there, most of them flat out wrong. You've also made no arguments, so I'd like to know: does it feel good to believe you're winning an argument because you can out ad hominem the other side? Do you get a high out of it? Does it make you feel like going out there and winning?
Lol. :)
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not "an insight a child would have". Good ideas mean nothing unless it leads to a marketable product. And for one smart janitor with business sense there are thousands of people who will just cost the company money. The CEO here managed to notice that among thousands, this is the janitor to listen to. As for CEO being well paid, it is simply because their decisions can make the company lose or earn a lot of mon…
> If a $500k salary earns the company millions If only CEOs were paid so little...
Aren't they though? I mean sure the CEOs of large, well known companies are paid many millions, but they are the highest paid CEOs. Seeing CEOs getting paid 100 million a year gets headlines, but most aren't paid that much. I wouldn't be surprised if the median CEO total compensation is less than 500k a year.
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 * 60k = 300k minutes (or 200+ days), so it would take you the better half of a year to listen to every single idea. Typically these things are sold up the management chain which can exercise discretion on which ideas are good and which are not. In this case the Janitor had nothing to lose by going directly to the CEO since I doubt his manager had much clout to sell this up the chain
Not every employee is going to have an idea. Having established an "idea box" in a 5,000 person company, I'm inclined to say 1 out of a 100 might.
Bingo. And, not everyone with an idea will speak up, for whatever reason. It's exactly like the lurker vs poster phenomenon, where, in any online community of any size, there tends to be vastly more lurkers than posters.
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah CEOs never get enough respect. Also they're paid FAR too little for having an insight a child would have... Good leadership is rare, you're right, and I don't think CEOs deserve credit for demonstrating good leadership. Good leadership should be table stakes for that position; the bare minimum. What needs to change are the astonishingly weak disincentives (and sometimes, actual incentives) aimed at bad CEOs. If…
It is not "an insight a child would have". Good ideas mean nothing unless it leads to a marketable product. And for one smart janitor with business sense there are thousands of people who will just cost the company money. The CEO here managed to notice that among thousands, this is the janitor to listen to. As for CEO being well paid, it is simply because their decisions can make the company lose or earn a lot of mon…
> As for CEO being well paid, it is simply because their decisions can make the company lose or earn a lot of money.
CEO pay has risen over 900% over the last forty years:
* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ceos-are-paid-278-times-mo...
Somehow I don't see the value that they bring to have increased by the same amount. From a Harvard study entitled "Are CEOs Rewarded for Luck? The Ones Without Principals Are":
> CEOs are rewarded for luck. Moreover, pay for luck is as large as pay for general pay for performance. Pay for luck also appears on the most discretionary components of compensation, salary and bonus. Looking closer, we found that pay for luck is strongest among poorly governed firms. Adding a large shareholder on the board, for example, decreased the pay for luck by 23 to 33 percent. This finding weakens two prominent explanations of pay for luck: “Paying for luck is optimal” and “Filtering out luck is impossible.”
* https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530152466269
* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_ceos_rew...
Another study, "What Makes a Winner? Toward Resolving the Role of Luck and Skill in Sustained CEO Performance":
> This study is an empirical examination of the extent to which luck can explain sustained performance. Using a unique empirical strategy of bootstrap simulations that we compare to actual performances of public companies, we observe that over 95% of the differences in performance outcomes between “top” versus “average” performers can be attributed to luck, even if all CEOs are equally skilled. Through this novel empirical approach, we can better incorporate the role of luck into studies of sustained performance, and our findings suggest that more attention should be placed on the role of unanticipated and even uncontrollable changes on performance.
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2827132
Re: How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos (2017)
#140The way this story is told, makes little sense.
So he sprinkled some Mexican seasoning on plain Cheetos and gave a presentation, and they gave him $20 million for that?
WTF?
There's a lot left untold. Or if this is the entire story, the CEO basically decided to make this guy into a millionaire, but he didn't have to.
Or this is a clever PR stunt with maybe a sprinkling of truth.