I work part-time at a cafe. A couple of days ago we had a huge festival in the city, and work was extremely busy. On top of that we had a worker that couldn't make it because her grandmother was sick. The cafe isn't particularly large, and we can comfortably run a regular day with 2 people on the shift. However, yesterday may have been as busy as it gets, and still 2 people (coworker A and me in the morning, coworker B joining around 2pm and coworker A leaving around 4). Understandably, we had trouble keeping up with customers, and cleaning up at the end of the day was a big hassle. No big deal, just one busy day. We left 30 minutes overtime, and glad the day was over.
But nope. The next day my boss is on my ass complaining how our cleaning and prep for the next day was unsatisfactory. Now if it was any other day I would have apologized and moved on. Yesterday of all days, was extremely busy. Was is so hard to understand we were understaffed and it was physically impossible to do any more? Since our establishment is run by a company that runs other restaurants in the area, I even asked around if anybody could spare hands on the day we were busy, which they couldn't. Apparently me asking for help in the other restaurants “disrupted the customers” and was very rude. Ok then. My boss goes on to criticize the poor job we had done and how they never had this sort of trouble before.
A little background, pretty much everybody that works at the cafe currently is a part-time worker. Since our last full-time worker quit, I get the sense that people haven't been trained well. The frequency of these long ranty messages from our boss has also increased, and only ever started being a problem after our full-time worker quit. Curious. Our job also has a lot of instructions that is only really transmitted by word of mouth, and requires some practice and getting used to. On top of that, the break room is tiny, a lot of our appliances are broken, or break easily because they are cheap and poor quality. I have a feeling the reason the full-timer was not replaced was also to cut costs. Really shows that they don't give a fuck about workers being comfortable, or necessarily the quality of their output. But when the minimum wage earning worker doesn't go above and beyond with their part-time job it's unacceptable? How delusional could you be.
I am quitting this month anyway, and glad I am. I don't feel great about how this had to end, but with shitty company policy and cost-cutting measures, I would not be surprised if more people quit and the quality of the establishment continues to go down. Fuck bosses, and fuck work.