Rick Silva took his turn on the television show, Undercover Boss, in which he talked about how his company has extremely high standards. Silva said that the CEO of Checkers and Rally’s, fast-food chain joints, always demands that the restaurants are perfect, ensuring that the customers are completely satisfied.
However, while under a disguise, and after visiting three separate restaurants, he found out that perfection was definitely lacking within these restaurants. For starters, employees were having a hard time hearing orders from customers over faulty speaker systems via drive through ordering. A lot of buttons do not have the right labels on them at the different stations as well. There are also floor managers who did not have much training and were therefore unable to run the restaurant in an efficient manner.
It was a true eye opener for Silva after finding out what some of the employees were dealing with. While undercover, Silva discovered that there was an employee for one of the restaurants who desperately needed his job to support himself and his mother. He was constantly abused by the manager, who always threatens each of the employees. The man, whose name was Todd, spoke up about the treatment instead of keeping shut out of fear or humiliation. He said that the treatment he has to endure makes him feel as if he is worthless.
Joyce, a separate employee, works as the late night manager for the restaurant. She is always cheerful and very upbeat. She tells Silva, who is actually still undercover at the time, that she sells hospitality. However, she did show that she could be mischievous at times as well. Joyce talks with Silva while he is undercover, telling him about losing her parents to issues that related to alcoholism, along with dealing with the death of her brother because of AIDS. Joyce also openly admits to being in debt.
After going undercover, Silva wanted to address these problems at hand and rectify them as soon as possible. Silva left the island of Cuba in 1959, directly after the Fidel Castro revolution took place. Silva relocated to Florida and said he was constantly a target because of his race. He claims that he was constantly called racial slurs and received a lot of negative comments from racist individuals who were not accepting to him due to his racial background. However, after being bullied for a certain amount of time, he finally took a stand against them and they eventually left them alone. This is something he chose to do for the rest of his life; stick up for himself.
With this in mind, Silva approached the bullying manager, Stevens, who was threatening and intimidating Todd, along with various other employees. Silva told Stevens that he is disrespectful and let him know that he is the CEO of the company. He also ended up closing one restaurant branch temporarily.
After going undercover, Silva decided to make some necessary changes, ensuring that new speaker systems be installed so that employees could actually hear the orders that were being given by the customers. He also gave Todd $15,000 to help care for his mother, along with giving Joyce $20,000, telling her that she needed to spend at least half of that money on herself.
While many chain restaurants may not seem perfect, the CEO’s of these companies do want the best for their employees and for their customers too.