alexandraerin

Dear Mr. Schnatter,

I understand that the tavern that became your first pizza place was a family business, that you initially went into business with your father. I understand that your business as it exists now--a national chain of pizza delivery places--is not a family business. I understand that your employees aren't kin to you.

I don't understand what they are to you, though.

Time and time again, when the question of the cost of insurance or of out-of-pocket medical care is raised, the refrain we hear from the politicians that you support and the businessmen who support them is "People should take responsibility for themselves. They should not be lazy bums who expect to have things handed to them just because they it."

Mr. Schnatter, are your employees lazy bums?

Do you think they are a bunch of slackers need to get up off their backsides and go out there and get a "real" job if they want to be able to afford health care?

What does that say about your company if that's the case? What does it say about you if you employ lazy bums? What does it say if the jobs you create aren't real jobs?

What does it say about the product these people make and sell for you, Mr. Schnatter?

I know you like to stand behind your product. I admired you when your company went to court for the right to stand up and say something as simple and true as the fact that using better ingredients yields a better result.

And you have reason to be proud of your achievements. You've embraced the future. Your pizza place had nationwide online ordering in a time when the old guard was cautiously dipping its toes into the internet. This kind of forward-thinking vision has earned you a lot of friends among the internet generation, believe me. It's what made me a fan of your pizza when I was in college. And even though Pizza Hut and Dominos and the other big chains followed suit, your online ordering experience is what keeps us coming back.

And that's not even getting into what you've done on your back end, with the distribution chain you've built to manage the inventory for your ingredients. No one's matched that yet. Maybe no one will.

I, uh, I don't want to be so indelicate as to ask about price, but I don't imagine that kind of quality and innovation could have come cheaply. I wonder if anyone pooh-poohed the price. I wonder if anyone close to the decision-making power in your company worried about the risk. But it takes money to make money. Better ingredients, better pizza. Better investments, better company.

So why not... better employees, better product?

Healthier employees.

More valued employees.

Are they not an essential ingredient to your success?

Mr. Schnatter, you came out and said that complying with the Affordable Care Act would rasie the cost of producing a pizza by less than a quarter. Fourteen cents. I don't know your profit margins. I don't know if it's reasonable to expect you to absorb that or not. I do know that our current business culture has made maximum profits at all cost the highest and often only goal of business... banks cry about their "right" to earn a profit when changes that would even slightly lower their record high profits are mentioned. So even if you could afford a 14 cent per unit hit without endangering your company's operability or anyone's livelihood, maybe it doesn't seem tenable. We live in a world where a company's stock can take a tumble not because the company is losing money but because their earnings this quarter didn't exceed last quarter's by as much as they'd planned.

So maybe every last cent profit is more important than anything, including making a better pizza or taking care of your employees.

But let's be honest: raising your pizza prize by 14 cents is going to dent your business. Of course, we all know that you're not going to sell a pizza for $x.13, so what you'll really do is raise the prices by a dollar. Might that put a crimp in demand? Maybe a small one, but your margins will go up.

Or you could do like the phone companies do and have a separate surcharge at the end of the order. There are already fees on my online orders. How many people would even notice a 14 cent increase?

The point is that there's no way it doesn't make sense for you to take advantage of this opportunity to improve one of the most crucial ingredients in your pizza, the people who make it.

Unless those people are bums to you.

Unless you don't consider what they do to be a crucial component of your company's success.

We live in a world where the law says corporations are people, and corporations treat human beings as interchangeable assets to be used up and replaced at need. Would you treat your proprietary blend of tomato sauce that way? Maybe it would be cheaper to just buy bulk drums of tomato paste and some dried herbs. Would you ever think of doing that? Would you treat the never-frozen fresh dough you truck to your stores from distribution centers that way?

Mr. Schnatter, I have been a customer of yours for fifteen years and I can't imagine you trying to boost your profits by substituting cheaper ingredients for your pies, so why would you cut corners when it comes to the people who prepare and deliver them?

It just doesn't make sense to me.

And it doesn't make sense to me to continue supporting a business whose founder and CEO seems to be making emotional decisions based on anger and resentment rather than empathy for his fellow human beings, and business decisions based on short-sighted politics instead of the clear-eyed view of the future that helped you build your business into the powerhouse it is today.

Mr. Schnatter, I'm going to come to the point.

Did you know that before you announced that it would cost as much as fourteen cents per pizza for you to provide your employees with health insurance, it never once occurred to me that they didn't already have it? The narrative in the United States is that job equals insurance, hence all the cries of "Why don't they get a job?" when we try to talk about the uninsured. I thought for sure your full-time employees were getting some benefits, even if they had a high deductible and a lot of out-of-pocket costs. Probably people who've worked in food services know better, but to those of us who haven't, that's just how it works. Job equals insurance.

But now you've taken the fact that you don't pay for your employees' health insurance and turned it into a matter of national interest. Not only that, you've publicly staked out the stance that you are categorically opposed to paying for your employees' health insurance.

Why?

I don't know.

As I said above, I can't make any sense of it. One minute you were saying you would but you'd pass on the cost to us and that seemed fine to me, and maybe you were disappointed that we didn't rise up en masse and reject that fourteen cent cost increase for you. Maybe you expected us to be so angry at the thought that you could say "The people have spoken." and wash your hands of it.

Whatever the case is, you've gone and put your foot down. You've thrown all ambiguity out the window. You've pulled the veil from over our eyes and announced where you stand, and that means I must do you the same courtesy.

So long as your employees are not offered health insurance and so long as you or your company is taking any action to support the repeal or blocking of the Affordable Care Act, I will not be ordering from you again. I will not be going in on any friends' orders. I will make sure that anyone who is considering ordering from you in my presence knows my feelings. I will support the efforts of anyone else I come across who is trying to raise awareness of your actions.

And I'm going to put this letter up on social networking sites, and encourage others to do the same with their letters to you. I understand that the voice of one customer in a CEO's ear doesn't make much of a buzz, so I'm going to create what buzz I can.

You gave away two million pizzas--the equivalent of about thirty million dollars in revenue, according to Forbes--as part of a promotion. I'm sure your company's advertising budget is in the millions, too. If you weren't so publicly opposed to the idea, you could very easily parlay the added cost of insuring your employees into a goodwill gesture that would drive business to your store.

Instead you've done the exact opposite, making a "badwill" gesture that no one's going to forget about any time soon.

I'm going to leave you with one final thought.

You got your start going into business with your father. Imagine if he hadn't treated you like his own flesh and blood, but like an interchangeable asset. Your hopes, your plans, your dreams, your ideas... none of that mattered to him, because he just needed someone to help him run a tavern. Where would you be now?

Now imagine that everybody who works for you now went into business for themselves. You've probably had this thought before: "If they don't like working for what I'm offering, no one's forcing them to stay. They could do what I did. After all, it worked for me." This is the big myth that's underpinning this whole thing: that everybody could do for themselves what people like you have done if they just put their minds to it. Mr. Schnatter, would it work for everyone to be an entrepreneur? Would the world work? Would you be able to run your business if everyone were an entrepreneur? Who would be your employees? Who would be your customers, for that matter?

The work-a-day world needs people who do work for others for a living, Mr. Schnatter, and those people have needs that their employers must provide. The system won't work otherwise. We've convinced ourselves that it can because it's been limping along like this for a while, and it can probably limp along a while longer, but eventually it's going to fall over. Let's do something about that before it happens.

Mr. Schnatter, this concludes my message to you. I hope to be eating your pizza again in the future, but if I do,it will be because you've changed your mind, not because I have.

Yours in hope, faith, and charity,
Alexandra Erin.