Richard pulled out a chair but did not sit. "I don't think we taught him to destroy cards," he replied carefully. "But I suspect we rewarded the behavior around it. We praised his numbers and didn't ask enough questions about how he achieved them."
"What numbers?" David asked. Richard opened the current store dashboard on his tablet. The figures looked excellent at first glance: high average transaction values, strong sales of certain premium collections, and a respectable conversion rate for customers who made it into private appointments. But the dashboard had no visible measure of customers discouraged before a consultation or complaints resolved satisfactorily after a refusal of service.
"That should bother us," David said, pointing to the omission. Richard nodded. "It does now. I'm afraid it should have bothered me sooner."
David shook his head. "Not just now. When we built the first maintenance company, Evelyn used to tell me every ledger had two columns you could see and a third you had to imagine. The first held money received, the second held money spent, and the third held people who would never do business with you again because you treated them badly. She was usually right about which one mattered most."
Richard leaned back against his desk. "We measure complaints," he said. "But I need to find out what happened to the ones we received. Victor wasn't supposed to have final authority to dismiss a formal complaint about his own conduct. If that's been happening, the reporting process is broken."
A knock interrupted them. It was Celia Grant, the retail division's human-resources director, carrying a folder and wearing an expression that told Richard she had learned enough to be concerned. She greeted David without surprise and explained that the footage had been secured, the physical card fragments documented, and Victor placed on administrative suspension pending interviews. "He'll have a chance to give his account," she said. "So will each employee and witness. We're treating this as a serious matter, not as a public spectacle."
David approved. "Good. Don't punish him because he insulted the company's owner. Examine what he did to a customer and to the employee who tried to intervene. Then ask yourselves what would have happened if that customer had been someone you didn't recognize."
Celia nodded. "That's the question we're using," she said. She hesitated, then added that the retail team had located several older complaints involving the same manager. Some concerned customers who had been told appointments were unavailable despite open slots, while others described humiliating remarks about clothing or apparent purchasing power. None was as severe as deliberate property destruction, but together they suggested a pattern that should have received attention long before the afternoon's incident.
David looked at Richard. "How many?" Richard's mouth tightened. "We're still gathering the records. More than I want there to be." He seemed ready to offer an explanation, but David raised a hand.