In rural Washington State, a local restaurant owner, who runs the kind of place where retirees linger over scrambled eggs and parents feed their children hamburgers, proudly told Anna Haley-Lock, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, how he avoided overpaying his workers. He set a rule that labor costs could equal no more than twenty-one per cent of sales each day; about half of that sum could be spent on front-of-the-house staff, and half on those in the back. Every half hour, the owner and his managers review an Excel spreadsheet with the latest totals. ?The labor percentage can?t exceed twenty-nine per cent at three P.M., or it?s unlikely to drop to twenty-one per cent? by the end of the day, the owner told Haley-Lock. ?At that point, managers know to ask some folks to go home.?
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