thought i might finally tell this story. i worked for a small (like 12 employees total) family run jewelry store for a year and a half. they paid $12/hr plus 10% of the total profit as commission off jewelry sales. this was some crazy good money as my second job at age 18/19. the place was terribly managed. they started training me to leave the sales floor and do repairs in the back to replace the person who was leaving for college, who they paid $15/hr since she didn’t make commission. still not great but whatever. about halfway through my training they decided to hire my brother instead, which is cool idc. however, the boss began taking advantage of the fact that i had repair knowledge, and kept sending me off the sales floor to do repairs. while still paying me the $12/hr, even though it was taking away from my ability to make sales commission. then, the other boss would tell me not to do that since i’m making less money, but in a way that made it seem like it was my fault that i was leaving the sales floor.
i was already super fed up with this company when my coworkers approached me about sending a letter as a team requesting a raise to $15/hr due to inflation. i know that number is actually way higher but we thought $15 was super doable. what we found out in this process is that our coworker who has been working there for like 30 years hasn’t received a raise from $12 since 2006! what a way to reward loyalty, right? we wrote a letter with statistics and shit and sent it with all our names signed at the bottom. we were not given a response or any acknowledgement for over a week, and we were then informed that “although the jewelry industry had experienced a boom this year, we have no idea if it is going to last” and “you have infinite room for growth with commission” and were denied any sort of higher compensation. i quit a few weeks later along with 33% of their staff, all of which had been there for at least a year. the kicker was that they denied us a raise, and then hired someone out of her previous NINE YEAR CAREER to be our operations manager. that has to have been expensive for them. money that they could have given to the people that have been actually running their business for decades. fuck that shit. now i’m a sever 3 days a week and although it’s stressful work i make better money.
i returned there a few months ago to be a model for their website since i had done it before and generally enjoyed it, and the president paid me more to model than she did to literally run her store and make her profit.