KCSpeaks

A little acknowledgement and recognition to go to an unsung hero occupation in the workforce, for the people working to make sure our surroundings businesses are neat, clean, tidy, and ready for operation. I am speaking about the Cleaners, Janitors, Maids, and Maintenance/Housekeeping department staff for pretty much every industry you can imagine. It is highly likely you frequent a business who either directly employs a staff member to keep the organization tidy or contracts with a company who sends a staff member to do the work.   I am fortunate. Daily, my work tasks do not include cleaning. When I leave after a day of other tasks, someone comes in to get the office clean and ready for the next day. I visit other businesses and organizations, and they either directly employ people or contract with people to keep things clean. Many times, I do not come in contact with the maintenance people. The only hint they are in the area are the carts of supplies either coming or going do...

Have you ever given much thought to where all that stuff we buy online is kept before it ends up in our homes?   Much of what people buy go from one large place, either the manufacturer, or seller, another facility closer to the consumer, before landing on the doorstep of the person who is eagerly awaiting their package.   These facilities are more commonly referred to as a warehouse. The warehouse is a temporary storage place for all the “wares” individuals and businesses buy or will buy. These warehouses are huge and everywhere. There are warehouses for pretty much everything anyone could possibly want. The content options are endless. Some are very large and can easily be a mile long. The number of workers needed for the industry to move goods around is huge. While driving the delivery truck is a huge industry, the people that make sure the goods get from cargo ships  to smaller delivery trucks, can be just as many. Each time another person chooses to shop online ...

  Technology, evolution, industrialization, environmental factors, and so many other things have changed everything in the entire world and how and where people have shopped is not any exception. The indoor shopping mall has become a dinosaur in many places, where once they were the place to go. Some readers may be familiar with the indoor shopping mall of the past, with every possible retail store you could choose from, perhaps a food court and restaurants, and many times entertainment attractions. Once a vibrant place, now shown bustling in American nostalgia filled television shows like the third season of Stranger Things. A quick stop in some recent traveling landed me in what looked like a large shopping mall from the outside. Once inside, the number of remaining retail tenants could be counted on one hand. There were mostly people looking for some exercise while getting out of the cold. It seemed scary and sad to see something that should be full of commerce,and keeping a...

  Doughnuts, donuts, crullers, fried holes or pastry, whatever you call them or how you like them, it is hard to imagine how something so simple can get so many people excited for a sweet and tasty treat and keep so many people employed throughout the country. I have vague memories from childhood of commercials featuring people getting up for work before the sun came up to make doughnuts. Doughnuts are so famous, how many tv characters have a love for them, and they are often featured in movies and on tv show. All this to say that the fried, sweet, pastry rings, or filled pillows of deliciousness are just the tip of the iceberg as we look at the amount of people employed in the foodservice industry, specifically in the baking arts. We all know about the big chains across the country. These places probably do not have bakers in the back and are making the product at regional commercial facilities and shipping them to their locations. Looking at these large operations, we have huge...

Happy New Year to all and just like 2022, this will be another year focusing on how work is happening all around us. Each year is in a cycle, not just a cycle of seasons, weather, and holidays, but a cycle of trade, commerce, and as people are, priorities. A new year means new resolutions and some people are going to focus on the traditional stuff such as eating right and exercising more, while others are looking at the things in their day to day that need to get in order. One of those areas is organizing stuff. There is an entire industry devoted to helping people control chaos, clutter, and keeping things in order. The organizing business is much bigger than you might expect. Just head to the store and you will see reminder signs that something in your life is not in the right spot, looks messy, or needs assistance. Retail trade and commerce has devised products for us to buy with the idea that people just us will need stuff to stuff our stuff in. It sounds silly, but this is legit...

  It is hard to spend time speaking about work and jobs without talking about what is probably one of the largest employers in the entire world. This employer has so many people, working directly for the organization, and hundreds and thousands of subcontractor worldwide. Christmas is a massive employer and so many people probably don’t even realize they are employees of a holiday. I understand that Christmas is a religious holiday and the goal of this is not to take away from the Christian symbolism behind the holiday. This post is to focus on the hundreds of jobs created and worked because of this one holiday.   The management at the top of the organization is highly confidential in nature, yet despite the important role the management plays in motivating and setting the scene for the season, they take no direct salary or benefits. Rather they subcontract to so many people to get the job done, on time, in order to meet the delivery expectation of December 25 th . In my w...