This happened a while ago. I don't work there anymore (Thank god) and have since found a much more gratifying and meaningful career, but I will never forget this moment for as long as I live.
To explain what happened in a nutshell, essentially if your store made its monthly production goals AND made budget (Sales after costs to the store were deducted), you would see an extra $200 on one of your paychecks the following month. This sounds great in theory; really motivating workers to make their goals and put out good products.
But unfortunately the 'Budget' part of this model is exploited to its fullest by corporate. You see, if something pops up and you hadn't yet received last month's bonus, they'd pull expenses from that budget causing you to lose it after being told you got it. Corporate decides to do maintenance on the parking lot? Kiss your bonus goodbye. They decide to repaint the entire store? Bye bye 200 dollars.
This happened so many times it was expected something would go wrong. Corporate always 'made it up' by ordering us chicken sandwiches which felt like the biggest fuck you possible. The term 'Chicken sandwhich' became an inside joke for when corporate decided to take our hard earned money.
The absolute worst offender of this behavior happened about 5 months ago. Things were looking good – we made budget and production goals, the store was looking good, we were all pretty excited to have some extra money.
Then someone at a store completely unrelated to us fell and had an eye injury.
To pay for this, Corporate took money out of every single store's budget in our region for the prior month causing 5 stores to be completely wiped out, right before we were about to receive our bonus checks. So essentially, we paid for the damages despite having absolutely no involvement.
I've never seen so many people walk out over the span of a week. There are stores that are still reeling over that situation, and Goodwill absolutely deserves it. The way they play with people's money is absolutely disgusting and I would encourage anyone considering working there to go somewhere else.