There’s a big mess in the backroom, but Mateo is on the phone trying to secure Celine Dion tickets. Garret tries to recommend hiring someone from an app to wait in line for Mateo, but Mateo reverses it and suggests that the two of them hire someone to clean the mess for them. They are outsourcing their jobs to someone who is willing to do the job for less while they focus on the things they want to do.
Carol wants to go to Sandra’s wedding, but Sandra doesn’t want her there. Garrett and Dina tried to tell Carol that she wasn’t invited, but that didn’t work. They approach Sandra with a different idea, offer Carol a better alternative than Sandra’s wedding so that Carol would hate missing the alternative. The three of them attempt to increase the opportunity cost of going to Sandra’s wedding, first by offering tickets to a Whitney Houston concert on the same day.
Glenn approaches Mateo with a request to not award Mateo with employee of the month for a 6th straight month. Glenn recognizes that Kelly may want to transfer stores because she feels unappreciated. Glenn thinks that giving Kelly the award, she may feel better about her situation at the store. Pareto improvements mean no one is made worse off by an action, but Mateo points out that Glenn is taking something from him and giving it to Kelly. This redistribution is common with the use of taxes to redistribute income to others in a society. While not Pareto-improving, it can be used to improve equity.
After realizing that Cloud 9 may be a toxic work environment, Glenn is having a hard time figuring out how to fix the situation. As a backstory, Kelly has been trying to transfer stores, but Glenn won’t let her. Jonah helps Kelly by convincing Glenn that Kelly is actually the reason the store has become so toxic. Jonah is hoping that Glenn will transfer Kelly to a different store. At first he doesn’t believe it, but Jonah is successful in getting Glenn to believe in Kelly as the cause rather than the corollary.
After Mateo is injured on the job, other employees share how much they were paid to not sue the corporate office. When Marcus cut his finger, he was given $500, but Sandra was given $1,000 for her injury. Marcus then decides to injure himself so that he can collect more money to help finance his new business (see clip above). The corporate office paid employees to sign a liability waiver as an incentive to avoid lawsuits, but now employees are trying to injure themselves for the money.
Dina and Glenn discuss Amy and Jonah’s new affair, but Amy points out that people behave differently when they’re being monitored. While Glenn believes most people behave appropriately, Dina notes that if you “take away the threat of punishment and you’d be horrified at what people admitted to doing.”
Dina and Glenn provide amnesty for employees to admit wrongdoing, even though they aren’t aware anyone has done something wrong. Incentives (like amnesty) can cause people to behave differently than under a condition without them. Dina and Glenn are hoping that amnesty will provide a strong enough incentive to convince some people to confess.
Glenn and Jerusha are having trouble finding a surrogate for their next child, but Dina becomes very interested. She considers that $20,000 is roughly how much money she earns in a year and begins pondering the things she would spend the money on. Dina and Glenn don’t get along, so they go through the effort to make it seem like they aren’t really interested, but both see the opportunity to exchange cash for surrogacy.
Cloud 9 has a policy of giving employees $1 for every Blue Card Rewards customer they sign up. Glen tried to email the customer list to apologize for a viral video filmed in the store, but a lot of the email addresses came back as undeliverable. Glenn questions Mateo about possibly signing up fake customers to get the $1 incentive, but Mateo denies that he would do something like this.
After coming down with an ear infection, Mateo reaches out to the pharmacist to see if he can get some medicine to help. He doesn’t have enough money to get a prescription, so he’s hoping he can bypass that system and go directly to the pharmacist. Tate subtly emphasizes that pills get miscounted all the time, implying that he can sell Mateo some drugs in exchange for cash. Black market transactions are hard to track, but they still represent an economic transaction where one person has something that another covets.
Teaching with Superstore