Lessons of the Jelly Donut

Columnist : Albert Paschall

Back in the last century when I was 12 I was hired at 75 cents an hour by the best donut shop in Montgomery County to sweep up after school. I loved it, regular hours and a pay envelope every Friday. I worked my way up to counter man, icing person and jelly donut stuffer.

Jelly donut stuffing was the hardest job in the place for me. My left – handedness had a tendency to conflict with the right handed machine. I squeezed too hard too often. I had to stand next to the owner while I was stuffing and more than once I felt his considerable wrath as every donut I crushed cost him a nickel. It takes a 13-year-old awhile to figure out that the guy who owned the place had to sell 15 donuts an hour just to pay him and about 50 more donuts an hour to pay all the other kids that worked their and then some more to pay himself.

The owner of that place was as generous as he was tough. Always something extra in the envelope at Christmas and on the rare occasions that he closed the shop everybody still got paid as though they had worked their shifts. Four years later I was the envy of my friends because I was up to $1.50 an hour, 25 cents more than they were making. And as tough as he could be, he earned our loyalty by rewarding hard work. None of us quit until we went off to college.

Running a donut shop today can’t be any easier. You’ve got to have consistent quality. Back then we might have sold a dozen varieties, today if you don’t have double that number you’re not in the game. You even have to sell seasonally adjusted donuts like pumpkin at Halloween and green and red icing at Christmas. Nothing gets stale faster than a donut, so you end up throwing your leftover inventory away every day.

Other things take much longer to get stale. Pennsylvania’s business climate began to erode about the time I worked in that donut shop. Factories closed and since then hundreds of thousands of job have been lost. Pennsylvania’s answer consistently has been to raise the cost of doing business here and some Democrats want to do that again.

Last week Senate Democrats called for Pennsylvania to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour. The excuse for this is that the Democratic Administrations in New Jersey and Delaware have done the same thing. Two wrongs aren’t going to make this disaster right. The state’s wide variety of business taxes, failure to actually reform property taxes and inability to cope with workers compensation costs are among the real reasons that Pennsylvania gets to boast that Wal-Mart is its largest employer.

There are a lot of lessons learned stuffing jelly donuts. One is that the jelly inside the donut will stay fresh long after the donut turns as hard as a rock. The elements that made Pennsylvania one of the nation’s leading employers through out the industrial age: location, its people and its beauty can make it great again. The less government interferes in that process the faster a new economy in Pennsylvania will rise.

The guy who ran that donut shop was tough. Building the best donut business in a county as big as Montgomery he had to be, especially back when donuts cost a nickel. But we were all treated fairly and our efforts were rewarded according to the job we did. Some days when I look back, it might have been the best paying job I ever had largely because of the lessons I learned there.

Albert Paschall
Senior Commentator
The Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research, Inc.

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