What kind of level of hiring? Is it for the kinds of jobs which absolutely need multiple managers present for the first interview? I’ve had plenty in the past where the first interview is very short and just with one person, quite possibly because they were checking whether applicants would, indeed, show up.

What’s the current labor pool for these types of jobs in your area, and are your competitors also seeing problems hiring people for such positions? Do you offer things that the competitors don’t, and which actual applicants or people working those jobs have said they’d look for? (Rather than making the assumption that some specific benefit would attract them.)

Do you get paid for consulting work in cash, or prefer another method (bank check, transfer of some kind, etc)?

How much of their demographic/clientele do you want to make an effort to pick up?

What kind of demographic is your clientele, and what sorts of things are they likely to look at? Are they Facebookers or TikTokkers or grannies reading the newspaper? Are they couponners? Are they the kind of people who have wide social circles and like giving friends discount referrals? Would they buy their friends/coworkers haircare-adjacent gift baskets, whether Christmas gifts, Secret Santa gifts, or just “going to early Christmas party” gifts?

Are you doing anything special or interesting for the holiday season? Types of haircuts or services or… whatever… that you wouldn’t normally do at other times of the year? Unusual cosmetics, sprays (glitter, green/white/red etc), Christmas-themed hair ornaments and/or earrings? Antler headbands and red noses?

Are there any local micro-businesses which make things that are kind of hair- (or self-care-, or cosmetic-) related, and are effectively operating online-only out of the their kitchen or garage? Are any of them making things which would be safe enough to allow them to effectively ‘rent’ a corner or patch of wall in your salon from you, boosting their exposure and brand in exchange for paying you a fixed amount per day/week? Even if it’s a little as just a poster with a Qcode (in case there might be legal issues with homemade cosmetics on the premises), they’re still getting their product in front of an established customer base with a focused demographic.

I’ve never had deep passion for any product, even the ones I came up with myself.

Were they good ideas? Sure. Did they help people? No doubt. But I’m not about to become an emotional Catherine wheel over a product. If the things I came up with and flogged disappeared overnight, the world would spin on.

Yep.

Admittedly, I’ve known local franchises of national cleaning chains which are cash-only. But their prices are exact amounts you can get out of an ATM; they don’t try and pretty them up by ending them in a 9.

In this particular case, given they (1) knew in advance that they were going to make a transaction, (2) knew what the amount of the transaction was, (3) didn’t set an amount which was a round figure, and (4) insisted on it being in cash, then yeah, it was very very much on them. To the point where them not having change was pretty much a deliberate ripoff attempt.

Of course, setting the price at $79 was absolutely also a way of trying to make customers think “Oh, I really should have gotten $80 in cash ready instead of $100, silly me, that’s totally on me, don’t want to cause a fuss over $20, I’ll know better next time.”

While there are parallels and overlaps between countries, in effect each country is going to have its own laws about this; there’s no singular multinational standard. Absolutely talk to a business lawyer or legal expert who has knowledge about the country you’re interested in, or at the very least contact the country’s relevant embassy in Portugal to ask for information/assistance.

Contact a local lawyer. Let them know that you don’t know if the drive was replaced or not, you might not be able to say exactly what was on it at the time, and you don’t know if the information on the computer has been used to do anything.

Whether they can still do anything at that point, I don’t know. Depends on your local legal system. Did the police arrest the employee for theft of the desktop?

…please tell me that’s a joke

Sounds like a fictional movie company name for assassins.

Maybe they liked spooning and, uh…

Do you have the UPS-tracking delivery photo, or could you obtain it? (Either directly, or if it went to court?)

If UPS is prepared to state in court that they delivered it, that’s pretty much it. The customer can request details from UPS and file a report with police. All that will happen if it goes to court is you show your correspondence with UPS where they said they delivered it with proof, the court presumably requests the proof from UPS, and either it turns out that yes, they did deliver it - which gets you off the hook - or they delivered it to the wrong address, which also gets you off the hook; you did all you could as the originating business, you were assured UPS delivered it, presumably it’s up to UPS to refund the customer at that point. That could depend on the fine print in the contract you have with UPS, though, and if they never actually guarantee to deliver or to cover costs of failure to do so, you may potentially have to cover the cost of the item - but you do have third-party-delivery-failure-insurance covering that, right?

As well as firing clinic staff who didn’t want to be forced to be cold-calling revenue-grubbing sales agents as well as their real jobs, while their new boss keeps calling themselves ‘excellent’ and ‘ethical’ and ‘high-paying’.

When you don’t have a house left at the end of it, maybe that wasn’t ‘cleaning’ so much as ‘detonating’.

And as if that’s the be-all and end-all that should make employees 100% onboard with spending their time doing things for the business which are not in their contracts and not things that employees do.

No-one knows you have a better car. No-one cares as much as you do, either; they just remember the name of the last taxi company/person they went with, and do that again. People (for the most part) don’t spend hours ruminating on their taxi experience and how it could have been better.

Yep. If you can think of a shinier way, that’s great… write it down and come back to it in the next tax year. For now, go with simple and direct.

Similarly, do not put unnecessary roadblocks in place when people try to give you money. Don’t say “We don’t take cash” when someone is trying to give you a fistful of it. Don’t make it difficult for people to transfer money to you in any of the formats which have been popular and standard for the last 50 years; some of your customers will be that old and older.

Pretty much. “We do not appear to be a good fit for what you’re looking for, we wish you all the best in finding a provider which better suits your needs” etc etc