I feel like some strange combination of those street corner preachers screaming, “THE END IS NIGH, REPENT YOUR SINS” and the grizzled war vet heading for their third tour of duty, but I have literally spent the past three days at Target trying to convince our Team Leads that we are not ready for Black Friday.
We literally have ONE PERSON scheduled from 12:15 to 3:30pm on Friday. She’s ALONE at Starbucks for over three hours. We have another girl alone from 12:30 to 2am during the BOGO free holiday drink special. Half of our trained staff isn’t even working in Starbucks, they’re cashiering. For the entirety of Friday we’ll never have more than two people in Starbucks when in past years we’ve had at least three people.
I went to HR and asked about that because it just didn’t seem right and she just coolly told me that this has been approved by our LOD and DM so there’s nothing we can do about it. Okay, so do they WANT the highest selling location to be run by one person for over three hours on Black Friday? We literally had more coverage yesterday, a normal Friday, than we will on Black Friday. Something is messed up there and I don’t feel as if I can trust our Team Lead to make it right. We’ve had this schedule for a week now and she didn’t notice these huge problems that I found after ONE CHECK of the schedule. It honestly feels like sabotage at this point.
Will Parry goes up to the counter and orders a dark roast to go. He brings it to the Botanical Garden in Oxford, sits on a bench, and drinks it in solitude.
if you’ve had access to deviantart you’ve probably seen every fetish known to man applied to at least 1 childrens cartoon animal or 90s cartoon character
when I was thirteen I discovered I could never watch The Jungle Book ever again.
today i found out that when monarch butterflies migrate south for the winter, all the ones that go across the middle of lake superior suddenly stop going south and go west for five miles and then continue south. which really freaked scientists out cos like What is in the Middle of Lake Superior what do Butterflies know that We Dont Is This The End Times etc. anyway turns out about a hundred million years ago there was a mountain there and the butterflies still think they gotta fly around it. classic butterflies
It really grates on me when people make judgments about a situation without the full knowledge, so I thought I’d jump in with what I knew, and it kinda led to a larger than I expected mess. Turns out my understanding of the situation was wrong… but I don’t regret talking about it.
Quite a few more dog behavior-saavy than I people jumped in and broke down exactly what was done wrong in that situation, and shared their knowledge of how to handle a dog with resource aggression. Anyway, I hope anyone that reads what I said also reads whatotherssaid so they know where I went wrong.
Connies mom: *points at crystal gems* You’re Stevens mother, you’re Stevens mother, you’re Stevens mother, I’M STEVENS MOTHER, ARE THERE ANY OTHER MOTHERS I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?!
In b4 getting flamed for my Caesar post: I love dogs and dog psychology, so if anyone does have any tested and effective ways for breaking dogs of food protective aggression, I really do want to know.
So, I personally haven’t had this issue with my dogs but this is what I know about solving resource guarding:
Dogs guard resources because they are insecure. A dog who growls when you approach its bowl of food is afraid that you will take their food away from them, and is warning you. Many people will punish this behavior, which could do one of two things: Either the dog stops growling, and you’ve essentially punished the dog for telling you it is ready to defend its resource, or the dog becomes even more visibly aggressive in defending its resource because you’ve punished it for letting you approach, making it more insecure.
The best way to actually solve resource guarding is classical conditioning; you want to change the dog’s emotional reaction to you being near its resource. So, you play what many call “The Trading Game.” Essentially, you teach the dog to give up something that it values because it will be returned later or replaced with something even higher in value. This teaches them that they don’t have to guard things so carefully and allows them to trust you around the things they value.
This is also just a really good game to play with dogs who don’t have issues with resource guarding, if not to prevent it, but to prepare for a possible situation if they happened to get ahold of something toxic or a choking hazard and you need to take it away.
To everyone interested, here’s another way to handle the situation!
When my 120lbs retreiver (Jeb) was younger he was food protective, but never bit or snapped at us. He did however growl if we got near him with his food. This was a big concern for us because no one wants a 120lbs dog to start getting aggressive, but also we have lots of family with small kids and even smaller dogs that come to visit. We also lived with an aging dog didn’t want Jeb to attack him.
What we did is we practiced taking his food bowl away from, waiting, making him lie down, and then we’d return it to him. We did the same with his favorite toys and large treats that he didn’t eat in one bite. He’s seven-years-old now and we don’t have the same problem anymore.
However he does like to play keepaway with things he steals from us so that Trading Game sounds like a good way to break him of that. … actually Jeb’ll probably just steal things and hold them ransom, knowing him.
In b4 getting flamed for my Caesar post: I love dogs and dog psychology, so if anyone does have any tested and effective ways for breaking dogs of food protective aggression, I really do want to know.
