The BUCK Starts Here By Chuck McGlawn

Let us you and I have a mind experiment. You got this buck and you want a candy bar. Your local Walgreens sells Super Snickers for a buck. You go there and buy one, and then proceed to eat and enjoy it. That buck that you spent has a huge job ahead of it. Some of that buck goes to pay the rent on Walgreens' location. Some of it goes to pay the insurance the store must carry. Some of it goes to the utility companies for power to light the store. Some must go to the maintenance crew for store clean up. Some of that buck must go trash removal. Of course, some must go to the clerk, his supervisor, his manager, and the District Manager. In addition, do not forget some must go for sales tax.

That list could go on for pages and pages before you ever get to the Mars Candy company that made the Super Snickers that you bought. Mars then would have additional pages and pages of things they must pay for like rent, insurance, utilities, employees, excreta, excreta, excreta, excreta, excreta. Did I mention excreta?  In addition, they must also buy chocolate, peanuts, and caramel with whatever part of your buck that they got.

I am sure that if you could list everyone that benefited by getting some part of your buck it would take a thousand volumes of a thousand printed pages each just to list them. You are feeling important, right.

In this thought experiment let, us give Mars Candy two factories one in Illinois and one in Mississippi. And Mississippi has just passed an immigration-friendly law, allowing an additional one thousand guest workers, and some go to work for Mars doing clean-up and janitorial work. Mars learns that these younger more energetic workers can get the jobs done with a 20% decrease in janitorial staff.

Instead of just cutting the janitorial staff, the plant takes the best of the 20% and places them around the plant in other jobs. This gives Mars the ability to do something they have wanted to try. They take the best from various divisions of the plant and they create an efficient staff. This group gets a pay increase and they roam the plant looking for waste in production. This plan works very well, and efficiency improves.

Company Management finds things going well and hire or train some bilingual supervisors. More guest workers are employed. Both production and profits are up.

You, unaware of all of this interaction, get an attack of the “sweet tooth”; you grab your buck and head to the Walgreens, where you find you are able to buy your Super Snickers for just fifty cents. On your way to your car, you find a vending machine and you buy a soft drink for that “Half Dollar”. And back in California Chuck McGlawn starts a new article entitled, “The Half Dollar Starts Here”