"Today was a terrible day because..."

[Altia]

Why was this closed? Reopening

You're the best, Speed-X <333
Prepare your ears for a mega rant!

This is old news, but gather 'round, friends.

At my last job, I was quite happy. I worked there for three years as a barista for a Starbucks kiosk. We were understaffed significantly, and the remaining employees wanted few hours and limited availability. One of our girls has a son with muscular dystrophy, who needs someone home with him at all times. This can be quite taxing on her availability, because her husband works many hours, and her other two sons live on their own and also work. I can't blame her for her circumstances, and she is a truly genuine person. Another lady, on the contrary, would lie, cheat and steal to get her time off. Nearly every story she told was a lie. And she'd do it with a toothy, crooked grin. She often made back-handed remarks, and was the root cause of many squabbles in the workplace. She knew the system and took advantage of it in a malicious way. She would time her call-outs just far enough apart to avoid write-ups. She was a terrible employee, even when she did work. Disorganized, and improper deployment--These things are extremely important at that job. These were just two particular employees who made it difficult to cover hours. This is not including the students attending college or high school, as even students were more cooperative with availability.

After my three years of working there, my manager seeked opportunity elsewhere. What did this mean? I saw a personal opportunity to take her place. It shouldn't take extensive training, as I knew the ins-and-outs of the job. The only things I needed to learn were scheduling, ordering, and inventory. Though Advanced Store Training is no simple feat. You are required to become trainer certified, and then comes the actual advanced training, which is ten workbooks that you're expected to complete on the clock, off the sales floor. It takes an estimated 40 hours, then your books must be reviewed, signed, and dated by your supervisor. The company I worked for made this EXTREMELY difficult, because they were not willing to 1. provide the hours, 2. extend my deadline to complete the workbooks to match the hours it takes to complete them, and 3. allow me to work at a table or desk for the amount of time it takes (most of my bookwork was done while I was on register or working alone).

I ran out of time.
We had no certified supervisor, and this was bad news if our district manager paid us a visit and found out.
And she did. She graciously granted me a couple of days to train with a supervisor at another store, where I crammed the remainder of my work. It was established that the next time she visited me that the workbooks were to be completed, that way she could certify me.
During this time, I was also scheduled to work at my store for 40 hours. We were dealing with frequent call outs, and often times we were down 50% of our staff for the day. I had promotions to set up, and no help from my team at all. I was consistently working 14 hour days. I got sick twice in a month, which is to be expected.

After my training was finally complete, and I was certified to manage the kiosk by my District Manager, I curiously asked my STORE manager when I was going to get the pay increase (as it should have happened at the very least, right after my certification, since I had been the ACTING manager for a month by the time I asked).

It turned out she had been stringing me along.
She hired someone for the position. What's more is that she expected me to Barista train her, Barista TRAINER train her, then give her advanced store training!
Barista training takes roughly 45 hours of on-the-clock training with a supervisor.
Barista trainer training should only be about roughly 8 if I remember. With a supervisor.
And then Advanced Store Training is another 40 hours.

This was all a huge ruse that my store manager had created so that she could, in a sense, "cut labor".
This is not at all how cutting labor works.
What she did was she ran us understaffed (while we were down people anyway), and she didn't want the store to pay for a Starbucks department manager wage, so she pulled some strings in order to buy a few months of time without having to.
Now of course, this was all a secret kept from the Starbucks district manager--had she found out, we would have been shut down.
In an open meeting with some front-end managers, my district manager, and my store manager, I made mention that we aren't making numbers because the employees that are left are stretched very thin. We didn't have the people to run the kiosk efficiently.
Our store manager didn't want her little "secret" to get out, so she told me with a dark smile "you're just an open book, aren't you?"
I replied "I'm an honest person".
And she said "yes, well you're being a little TOO honest."
Umm... There I am, thinking "what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Angry, tired, run down, sick, underpaid--I was still left with the task of training my 'replacement'. I initially told my store manager I would complete these tasks. But that evening, I grew a backbone. The very next day, I laid my two weeks notice on her desk. She looked at me and said "I thought we had an agreement."
To which I replied "Things change."
She should know how 'things change', shouldn't she? Ha...

I'm still quite angry about this event.

You know, people who put in their two weeks there are given a card, a cupcake, and some acknowlegement.
Me? Zilch. I had a few customers who thought to stop in and say goodbye.
Aside that, nothing. Even the people who I thought I had shared a special bond with....
It was cold. So cold.

I can't possibly begin to describe my resentment toward my final experiences there.

But I moved. Things are changing for the best. <333

It feels great to rant that all away!

None of this happened today, but sometimes the memory haunts me.