In a large department store, the scheduling would be a huge amount of overhead that seems in the end not worth it when you’re paying people the same anyway whether they work 6 or 12 hours. Only competition will change that, but then one comes back to employment and there simply are too many available low-cost workers.

But thinking about Mr. Zheng, is he really THAT overstaffed? What would happen if he adjusted schedules, kept salaries the same, but gave people off hours from noon-2pm, dinner time, etc.

First he’d have to schedule, who get’s the perk each day of not coming in until 2pm. If everyone came in at 1:55 pm, they probably wouldn’t have things prepped when customers come in. If people rotate, how many people can he give the perk to on a particular day, he’s got to have a core stylist, washer, and cleaner for the odd customer that comes in. Are daily customer patterns predictable after 2 pm also? What happens thru dinner hours and from say 9 pm to midnight? If he has typicall unpredictable rushes in those later hours, it’s pretty tough to run a core staff then and not be turning away customers. With tight margins, this would not be acceptable.

Does he have THAT regular of a flow of customers that a schedule can be predicted and adjusted, do they capture the flow on a spreadsheet and consider demand peaks, and marketing promotions? Do they then market and drive business for slower parts of the day? Are simple things like the staff is reliable enough to make such tight adjustments in the schedule. Who would do this scheduling?

You see where this is going， it’s a higher-level of management, but where’s he gonna learn it?

On a similar line of questioning from the other readers, if you’re a small business owner in China, would there be an advantage to implementing a western style system of part time workers and job scheduling based on observed traffic flows for your business?

In my opinion, there would absolutely be an advantage. Mr. Zheng told me that labor is his biggest expense, and obviously a lot of this labor is being wasted. The problem, however, I think is imbedded within the system. In the West, many people (espeically students) work part time jobs. In China, this is not as common. While it does happen occasionally, you are either fully indebted to your work (like our barbershop) or fully indebted to something else (such as school)…the two generally don’t mix. While it would make business sense for Mr. Zheng to employ a western style system of shift management, my guess is he would not be able to find the workers to do it.

why doesn’t Mr. Zheng reduce the number of workers?
Do your workers also try to study during those hours that are not very busy?

I think the problem is that in China 99% of all workers are full time. There are times (though few and far between) when the entire staff is busy. If Mr. Zheng were to trim the staff, he could only do it by firing some workers, not by shortening their hours. This is because if he shortened their hours he would probably also have to decrease their pay (otherwise, what’s the point?) If he decreased their pay, they would probably just quit. So in order to have enough staff when the shop is busy, he needs to keep all of the full time employees.

As for studying during downtime, I have asked about this as well. My thinking was that if you know you are going to have 3 to 5 hours of downtime per day on the job 322 days per year there is an incredible potential for studying…possibly learn English, read the annals of Chinese history, memorize the telephone book? However, it still seems that most time is devoted to the newspaper, magazines, cell phone games, and general clowning around. When I asked one of my colleagues, he told me that most of the workers in the barbershop don’t like studying anyway (which is why they are working there instead of going to college, or high school for that matter). Simply put, they have already given up on studying and are committed to lives in the service industry.

Disclosure – I am all for efficiency. I usually work 4.5 days a week, M through T and 1/2 days on Fridays. Efficiency is vital for being productive.

Something I’m curious about: has your presence affected the flow of business in the shop in any way? My apologies if you’ve addressed this before in an entry or in a comment.