Parking Attendant Shirking

Since my Junior year of high school, my family has collectively decided to take up a new hobby, one that requires great skill and attentiveness, an analytical sense of the market, and a very competitive nature... the trade of being parking attendants. My father works in a building his company owns in downtown Tampa where many people park their cars to see concerts and the Lightning Hockey Team play in Amalie Arena a couple of blocks away. We decided that instead of letting people free ride, we should charge them to park in the lot. Normally, we charge $10-$20 per spot, depending on competitor lots, for regular-season hockey games or concerts, but when the Lightning are in the playoffs, we are able to charge up to $60 (cash or Venmo), depending on the supply and demand. The lot has 13 spaces, and normally fills up in less than an hour. All the job entails is that we stand outside the lot facing the traffic waving a sign that reads the amount we were charging for the night. Once a car sees us and decides to park, we show them to their spot and collect our profit. Recently, we have even upped our game and bought flashing lights and wear bright orange vests. It is the easiest and quickest profiting job I will probably ever have!

While my mom wanted nothing to do with what she thought was an embarrassing project (we would in fact be standing in the middle of downtown wearing orange vests on yelling at cars going by) my dad, my sister Miles, and I decided to all take turns parking the lot. However, it became clear even from the start that my sister Miles was going to be a problem. Every time it was her responsibility to hold the sign, we would catch her either with the sign on the ground while she was texting on her phone, not paying attention to cars driving by or wanting to park, or complaining that her arms hurt. She would rely on my dad to help her park, but in the end, she would still maintain all the profits. Through and through, Miles was a shirker!

My dad and I had a team meeting on how we were going to control Miles's shirking. We came up with two solutions. First, since there is a well-defined output, so we were going to keep the rules strict: however many cars just Miles parks is the profit she keeps. Monitoring her behavior clearly was not working, so we decided the second way to keep her motivated was to secure an alternative. She wasn't threatened that my dad or I could take her spot, but when we hired Bryce, her boyfriend, to pick up her slack, she became enraged that we chose him over her. The next thing we knew, Miles was hard at work, and at least for the time being, we had solved her shirking problem!