Bob's Big Boy, Evil Empire?

June 1, 2008 6:39 AM

An older guy I used to work with (who had no sense of humor) once claimed that Bob's Big Boy subjected their employees to extensive psychological testing and used the results to keep them in the fold no matter what - supposedly this included giving baseball fans season tickets, car buffs a sweet company car, etc. I found this completely implausible and totally hilarious. Can anybody confirm or disprove that Bob's Big Boy was some kind of Machiavellian empire that knew its employees' deepest desires?
posted by mattholomew to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

I thought that Big Boys were regional franchises?
posted by k8t at 7:30 AM on June 1, 2008

I cannot vouch for Bob's Big Boy, but I have been asked to take a psychological profile when applying for a restaurant job at a national chain. I played along at first, but the questions were, I felt, inappropriate and over-reaching, so I invited the interviewer to go fuck himself and walked out, thus saving them the expense of grading the test and then finding out that I'm not a team player. Strangely enough, they didn't thank me for sparing them the time and expense. They closed within two years -- way to build a team, guys.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 7:43 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

I thought that Big Boys were regional franchises?

Correct. A list in the obvious place.

I worked for the Elias Brothers Big Boy in Detroit as a chef. Yes, they called their cooks "chefs." Obviously I can't disprove the claim in the question, but I can only say that in my year there, I never heard of such a thing. My brother was an assistant manager, and he never mentioned anything like that either. It sounds suspiciously like a paranoid urban legend to me.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 7:52 AM on June 1, 2008

Worked there when I was teenager, before the location was bought out by Shoney's.

I saw absolutely nothing that indicates what you friend describes. NOTHING.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:16 AM on June 1, 2008

Pre-employment psychological testing is pretty common, and lots of big companies either do it or used to do it. Keeping employees in the fold no matter what, quite a bit less so.

(I see how it is. When some dot-com buys a ping-pong table, they're all hip and cool. But when Big Boy buys some guy season tickets, they're a Machiavellian evil empire.)
posted by box at 8:34 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

I worked for Bob's Big Boy in 1979 and 1980 as a dishwasher. There was no psychological anything. They "kept me in the fold" by letting me play in the water all day long and flirt with the waitresses.

Once they "promoted" me to cook, i booked. I assume that even rudimentary psychological testing would have revealed that I had neither the intelligence nor temprament to be a cook.
posted by stubby phillips at 9:20 AM on June 1, 2008

This would be a recent phenomenon, and not limited to Bob's Big Boy. I once applied to a job for a telephone company, and they used a psych test as part of the weeding out process. Needless to say I never worked for them.

This is probably not a routine policy for all Big Boys everywhere, but being regionally owned, some of them may have a human resources department run by individuals who swear by one test or another and convinced their superiors to use it on their inferiors.

Then again, most urban legends proliferate because of the plausibility - regardless of any factual basis (or lack thereof) to back them up. Speaking of urban legends, nothing shows up with a couple Scopes searches. Not sure what that means one way or the other.
posted by ZachsMind at 10:14 AM on June 1, 2008

Are you sure the older guy was the one without the sense of humor?
posted by troybob at 3:32 PM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]