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By Root 1332 0

much of his time and doesn’t seem driven by publicity needs. He donates money to local charities and gives speeches at local schools. He pays some of the college tuition of his regular employees, so long as they maintain a 3.0 grade average or higher. And he recently helped organize the city’s first high school hockey team, which draws players from throughout the district. Feamster paid for uniforms and equipment, and he serves as an assistant coach. The majority of the players are Latino, from the sorts of backgrounds that do not have a long and illustrious tradition on the ice. The team regularly plays against high schools from Colorado Springs, which have well-established hockey programs. The Pueblo hockey team has made it to the playoffs in two of its first three seasons.

Despite all the hard work, the future success of Feamster’s business is by no means guaranteed. Little Caesars is the nation’s fourth-largest pizza chain, but has been losing market share since 1992. Hundreds of Little Caesars restaurants have closed. Many of the chain’s franchisees, unhappy with the company’s management, have formed an independent association. Some franchisees have withheld their contributions to the chain’s advertising pool. Feamster feels loyal to the Ilitch family and to the company that gave him a break, but worries about the reduced spending on ads. Even more worrying is the recent arrival of Papa John’s in Pueblo. Papa John’s is the fastest-growing pizza chain in the United States, adding about thirty new restaurants every month. In the fall of 1998, Papa John’s opened its first unit in Pueblo, and the following year, it opened three more.

The fate of Dave Feamster’s restaurants now depends on how his employees serve his customers at every meal. Rachel Vasquez, the manager of the Belmont Little Caesars, takes her job seriously and does her best to motivate crew members. She’s worked for Feamster since 1988. She was sixteen at the time, and no one else would hire her. The following year she bought a car with her earnings. She now makes about $22,000 a year for a fifty-hour workweek. She also receives health insurance. And Feamster annually contributes a few thousand dollars to her pension fund. Rachel met her husband at this Little Caesars in 1991, when she was a co-manager and he was a trainee. “We made more than pizza,” she says, laughing. Her husband’s now employed as a clerk for an industrial supply company. They have two small children. A grandmother looks after the kids while Rachel is at work. At the back of the kitchen, inside a small storage closet, Rachel has a makeshift office. There’s a black table, a chair, a battered filing cabinet, a list of employee phone numbers taped to a box, and a sign that says “Smile.”

Fourteen of Feamster’s employees meet at the Belmont store around seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Feamster has tickets to an event called “Success” at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver. It starts at eight-fifteen in the morning, runs until six in the evening, and features a dozen guest speakers, including Henry Kissinger, Barbara Bush, and former British Prime Minister John Major. The event is being sponsored by a group called “Peter Lowe International, the Success Authority.” The tickets cost Feamster $90 each. He’s rented a van and given these employees the day off. He doesn’t know exactly what to expect, but hopes to provide a day to remember. It seems like an opportunity not to be missed. Feamster wants his young workers to see “there’s a world out there, a whole world beyond the south side of Pueblo.”

The parking lot at the McNichols Arena is jammed. The event has been sold out for days. Men and women leave their cars and walk briskly toward the arena. There’s a buzz of anticipation. Public figures of this stature don’t appear in Denver every week. The arena is filled with eighteen thousand people, and almost every single one of them is white, clean-cut, and prosperous — though not as prosperous as they’d like. These people want more. They are salespeople, middle managers, franchisees. In the