Stoned Boss

BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the stoned boss.

You completed your degree in business, but because of the bad economy, the only job you can get is a manager trainee position with a convenience store chain.  You take the job because it will do two things for you: (1) it will pay your living expenses, so you can survive without going home to live with your parents; (2) it will give you real-world experience running a retail business that will pad your resume.

The store you are assigned to is in a poor neighborhood with high criminal activity, and you know that working there could be dangerous.  However, for the time being, you keep your cheap apartment near the university and take the bus to work (you have a car, but you don’t want to park it in that neighborhood).  You also bring your lunch because the only eateries near the store are fast food or ethnic-centered restaurants, and you are a health food advocate. 

You work hard and impress your boss, the store manager.  He tells you that you will probably succeed and advance within the company.

However, a few weeks after your starting there, you realize that your boss is a little loose with the rules.  He goes into an alley behind the store and smokes marijuana during his break time.  Although you know he is stoned for at least half of every shift, his performance doesn’t seem to be affected.  You also have seen him take sandwiches from the cooler, but have never seen him pay for the sandwiches.  In fact, he tells you that you can eat anything you want from the store as long as you keep track of the items, which can be deducted from your next paycheck.  You suspect that he doesn’t keep track of what he eats and just writes it off as shoplifting.  Once you caught him having sex with a woman from the neighborhood in the storage room.  He laughed off the incident.

You have always been a consequentialist, so as you think about your predicament—a new employee who knows that the boss is operating against company policy and doing something that is illegal—you worry about whether you should do anything or tell anyone else.  No one seems to be being harmed by the boss’s actions, although he sets a terrible example for the employees.  The store is popular in the neighborhood and sales are good.

1. What should you do?
2. Quit the job and accept dependence on your parents.
3. Report your boss’s degenerate behavior to his boss, the regional manager.
4. Begin having sex in the storage room, too.
5. Report your boss to the police.
6. Keep your mouth shut and do your job and hope for an early promotion.
7. Smoke marijuana with your boss.
8. Discuss your concerns with the boss.
9. Ask for a transfer to another store.
10. Accept the situation, realizing that upper management might know about your boss’s behavior, but because the store makes money for the corporation and getting a good manager for that particular store in a dangerous neighborhood is not easy, his behavior is overlooked.
11. Pig out at the store but don't report what you eat because no one cares anyway.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.