ABERDEEN, Wash—Former dentist and unsuccessful restaurateur Millie Morgan, 51, told friends yesterday that he was now more informed than ever concerning why nine out of 10 new restaurants fail to make it to a first-year anniversary. Despite months of Morgan touting that “restaurant failures happen to guys who can’t handle the heat,” and explaining that his establishment was above the mundane competition, the family-style eatery “Millie’s Place” shut its doors $180,000 in the hole after only eight months.

Morgan, who had been a successful local dentist for 20 years, retired early last year to pursue his dream of owning and operating a restaurant. Like most first-time restaurateurs, Morgan had absolutely no experience in food and beverage operations; and also like most first-time restaurateurs, he said that this detail did not disqualify him from operating a food-service operation. His only link to the industry was an original-recipe salmon casserole friends and family have raved about since the 1960s, and the several thousand occasions he ate food.

“I really thought because I used canned creamed corn in the casserole and a special mix of secret spices [Mrs. Dash] that ‘Millie’s Supreme Salmon Casserole’ would have been a crowd favorite, but it was hard getting the chef to make it correctly.”

Morgan stated a number of reasons restaurants fail, among them alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamines, theft, ignorance, sleepiness, and public masturbation, and he mentioned that he never imagined encountering so many staff-related challenges.

“Most of the time I felt like I was running a homeless shelter—these were not the same people who I’d interviewed when running my practice.” Morgan said that because he assumed that most of America’s workforce was quite similar to the caring, educated, and humane personnel he encountered while operating his dental practice, he never imagined he would have to keep an eye open for alcohol and drug abuse.

“The first time I caught one of my cooks drinking I was so flabbergasted, I fired him on the spot,” Morgan said. “But then I had to work six days in a row to cover for him, and seeing I can’t cook, that didn’t go too well.” Morgan added that while he was cooking, half his customers sent back their food or walked out. “I finally hired a guy from the welfare office who had been an army cook in Vietnam. He showed up to the interview completely inebriated and was carrying an assault rifle, and I hired him on the spot.”

The same scenario occurred when Morgan caught two of his dishwashers sharing a marijuana cigarette by the Dumpster. Morgan was forced to wash dishes for eight days straight, during which time the Health Department fined the eatery $500 for washing the dishes at too low a temperature and for not using a sanitizing solution in the final rinse.

During this time, when Morgan worked in the back of the establishment, waitresses began a systematic scam, in which they charged customers for beverages but pocketed the money. By the third day, this scam included desserts and side dishes, and finally simply nothing was properly recorded.

“I got a little suspicious when I heard we’d made nothing for the day. Millie Morgan may not be a chef with five of those stars, but he wasn’t born yesterday.” Morgan recalled washing a plate that contained a half-eaten portion of a “Mega Millie Cheese Burger” with a side of “Silly Millie Fries,” a bowl that could only have been a serving of “Millie Chili,” and a glass that had contained a Pepsi, one of the few products that pervaded at Millie’s Place without a zany Millie-esque appellation (but only because of the insistence of Evergreen Beverage Distribution).

Regardless of his suspicions that his employees were stealing from the till, Morgan curbed his gut instinct to dismiss anyone until he could hire a replacement dishwasher. In order to avoid suspicion, waitresses returned to a program of only skimming off of beverages, desserts, and side orders, a pattern that was undetected until the end since Morgan felt inventory was for “shifty employers who don’t believe in their staff.”

Morgan hired dishwasher Mark Raymond, a developmentally disabled adult from a halfway house who had a predisposition to sobbing and who occasionally masturbated while washing dishes, but he never fired any front-of-the-house staff. He said he realized they were the only members of his crew who were not drunkards and who could speak grammatically correct English. He did request, however, they refrain from dealing methamphetamines while on his property.

During the last month of operation, Morgan became withdrawn and despondent as he realized that he was about to become one of the causalities in a field that some label as “one of the most difficult industries in the world.” To make matters worse, employees came and went as they pleased--openly stealing bottles of liquor, cuts of meat, and even furniture-- and the entire back-of-the-house staff took to constantly self-pleasuring themselves after they realized developmentally disabled dishwasher Raymond would not be fired for doing the same.

“I just didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t fire anyone because it was so hard to find replacements, then they’d turn out to be worse anyway, so I had no choice but to stop doing it. Who would have thought running a restaurant would be so different than having a dental practice? And I really believed Juan was going to return the booths and the flat top after his keg party.”

Morgan said that he plans to re-open his dental practice and hopes to make some of his money back by selling the remaining 2,500 T-shirts that read “I ate at Millie’s Place and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” at a discount rate to patients.