Q And how did you feel about that, Ben? I mean, did you, did you also feel like, you know, this is weird. I'm a businessman. I never signed up for this.
A Yeah, uh, there was a time when, when Jerry and I both turned around and looked at ourselves and said to each other, you know, we're not ice cream men anymore. We're spending our time being bosses and hiring and firing, and so much of what we were doing was in order to pay our loans back to the bank, and we felt like We were becoming just another cog in this economic machine. Our reaction to that was to, to sell the business, and we actually put it up for sale. This was early on. This was in the, in the eighties. And then I ran into this older restaurateur that I had come to know a little, and I explained to him that we were planning to sell the business, and he said, Ben, how could you possibly do that? The business is your baby, it's, it has so much potential ahead of it. And I said, Maurice, you know what business does. It exploits the community. It exploits its employees. It exploits the environment. And he said, Ben, if there's something that you don't like about business, why don't you do it different? And that was when we decided to conduct this experiment to see if it was possible that business could be A tool for improving the quality of life for people as opposed to making people's lives worse.
AI assessment note: “we felt like We were becoming just another cog in this economic machine.”