Bear with me, this is gonna be long but it’s crazy.
I am a baker, I applied to a job listing and got a call back, on the phone interview the lady says she lost her entire staff over Christmas. “I don’t know” she says. “They all just quit on me. Whatever” tells me she will start me at $16 an hour and won’t overwork me like my last job did. I didn’t have a job at the time and I hadn’t heard from any of the other places I applied to and I was starting to really struggle financially so I disregarded the first red flag and went. I met the owner and the new staff. I’ll call the owner Mary (I’m changing names for the sake of anonymity) Mary introduced us to her husband John, a 60 something y/o nurse but he wasn’t working because Mary “didn’t want him to get that shot”. I immediately noticed how dirty it was there. This was a scratch bakery that specialized in home made old fashioned pastries. There was flour literally everywhere. I’ve worked in a lot of bakeries. I spotted several health violations immediately. The floors were coated in dirt, it looked like it hadn’t been mopped in months. There were open bags of flours and sugars on the floor, The refrigerators were not up to temperature. All of the machines were coated with batters, they literally never got cleaned. (Later when going through the fridges I found moldy doughs and expired ingredients they had us use) I’m looking at all of this and taking it in. Mary tells us her life story while we all introduce ourselves and she shows us around. She says she and her husband are from another state where they owned a bakery, closed it, then moved here 6 or 7 months ago to take over this new business they bought. She stated that she bred dogs on the side but didn’t talk about it much (more on this later). She spent the next hour talking shit about the previous staff. She went on about how they sucked and had bad attitudes. The old staff just didn’t come back after closing for a Christmas break. She said it was to screw her over and they quit even after a $3 pay raise. Red flag city over here! They were complaining about how dirty the place was (they owned this business for months by now) and they were still blaming the previous staff for the place looking like this! Then mary started naming off very popular bakeries in my area and saying everything she had from these places tasted like “dog shit”. I knew something was up and I was standing there wondering if everyone else could see how full of shit they were. I was there for 10 hours on my first day. The second day I worked 12. I complained and got a $2 pay raise and I’m poor so that made me feel less stressed out. I was told we wouldn’t be there as late in the future, just for training. Mary’s husband John got to be unbearable fast. I got a bad vibe from this guy from the start. He was huge (6’4 350lbs) and I’m a 5’4 170lbs woman. The first week, he took a photo of me and it made me uncomfortable. He was joking around and I asked him to delete it and he showed me he did, but I know he didn’t fully delete it because it saves in the “deleted photos” album. The thought of him having it made my stomach turn but I really tried to ignore it. my coworker was cool and I only had to deal with John and Mary for a few hours a day at most. Mary barely ever came in at first, John was always there. Mary clearly had a thing for my coworker, she would talk to him with kindness and respect, Whenever he pulled something out of the oven it was the most amazing thing she ever tasted, if I pulled something out, she would complain and tell me it was wrong even if I did exactly what my coworker did. I made everything the way she had it written on her recipe and she would tell me it was wrong even when I knew I did everything right, I didn’t realize it at the time but she was just fucking with me and soon every interaction I had with her was a negative one. Her gross husband started grabbing me by my wrists and pulling me around places. I’d be working and he would walk up to me and be like “come on” and just grab my wrist or hand. I would always snatch it away roughly. He did this almost daily. He would say “I’m a nurse, you can get close to me I’ve seen it all”. I had so much on my plate and the job was stressful I tried to ignore him the best I could. I knew from my interactions with Mary and how hostile she was towards me, she would use it against me somehow if I told her how uncomfortable John made me. My boyfriend applied for a job there because he was bored at home a lot, Mary hired him and I was relieved to have him working with me because John was getting worse. I could tell John didn’t like him. I’d like to point out, the whole time I worked there, I never witnessed john touch my coworkers the way he would with me. John would only come around if I was there. My coworkers told me he never bothered them if I wasn’t around. if I asked for help from my coworkers he would intervene every time he had the chance. Also, every single morning he would meet me at the door to greet me and chat with me, not with my other coworkers, just me. for an hour every morning it felt like he would just follow me around no matter how short I was with him. He just refused to take the hint. Then one day while working I broke a paddle to one of the machines. The one I broke was no more than $80 and I was upset and embarrassed that this happened. John told me it was fine but was trying to comfort me and he just straight up grabbed me and hugged me. I was pushing him away the whole time but he wouldn’t stop. He told everyone there it was okay and that I didn’t have to pay for it (lol I wouldn’t have anyway but okay) there is a reason I mention this, keep it in mind.
John kept doing little things to make me uncomfortable. I went in the office to give an inventory list and he started looking me up and down and telling me to try on the new aprons and that “maybe I would fill them out better” as he made a motion toward his chest. I walked away feeling disgusting. I caught him looking down my shirt as well. my bf and I were working on doughs one day and John made some stupid joke and he kicked me on my butt while I was working!!! I stood in complete shock and kept my head down. I know I should’ve lost my shit on him right there but I was so taken off guard and I’m naturally a very timid and EXTREMELY shy person so I froze up like a fucking idiot. I cried in my car that day and I didn’t know what to do. Yes I should have at least told him to never touch me again but I feared retaliation. I also realized this wasn’t going to last, I was going to walk out any day because this place was so unprofessional. At this point every morning I would wake up debating on even showing up. Mary kept complaining to me about payroll being too much for her. She pulled my bf and I in a small room and started talking about being paid off the books because taxes were too much for her. John came in the room behind her and it was like a switch flipped. He normally had this facade of playing the dumb old country boy but now he was trying to be manipulative and talk us into this. My bf and I were like “Um we can talk about it later” and they didn’t seem happy about it. We were just pacifying them. I had no intentions of being taken off payroll and my bf hadn’t even gotten put on the books yet. We knew our time was winding down there. I only worked there for a month and a half and already almost walked several times. She started messing with my pay after this. On payday she clocked my boyfriend and I out at 5:00 and when we were walking out the door, she told me she didn’t want me working any overtime because she couldn’t afford it, then she gave me a list of things she wanted done every Monday (Mondays are extremely busy and there already isn’t enough time.) we were there for 36 minutes past the time she clocked us out. It was also so late that I couldn’t get my check in the bank in time so I had to wait the weekend for it to be deposited, and that Monday was a holiday. She also started picking on me for everything I made that day and when one of the breads I made was slightly overdone, she said “you didn’t bake at your last job, did you?”. I should point out the pizza oven she had me using wasn’t calibrated and everything came out either overdone or raw. Mary and John got into the habit of texting me after I went home. At first it was just John. The day before we walked out, I got about 30 texts from mary and John. They were texting me pictures of old moldy doughs that I got sick of looking at and threw away. These were in the fridge for months. They were digging through my garbage and questioning me, so I told them the truth. I also stated I didn’t want to be bothered off the clock anymore, and I told Mary about how John had kicked me on my ass and keeps grabbing me. I said that I want to be shown the same respect as everyone else and to not be touched at all. Mary and John both were texting me separately, but at the same time. John made sure to text me to let me know he wouldn’t be working there anymore, I didn’t respond to either of them. my bf and I were shocked at their behaviors and decided to Google them and found out that they own a puppy mill in the state they moved from and everyone in the breeding community knows to avoid them. They have been sued more than once for selling sick dogs. The dogs they breed have seizures and there are multiple posts on various sites I have found from people who have bought a dog from Mary only for it to die a few weeks/months later. They have been doing this for years and posts I’ve found online say she’s already been investigated. Mary’s daughter in law recently took over the business because Marys name is trashed and all you have to do is Google her to see what kind of person she is. My bf and I were horrified. We also found out the reason she closed her last bakery was because her entire staff walked out on her. Racism was an issue. Mary had no problem saying the n word I heard her say it multiple times, she referred to middle eastern people as sand n word. That’s what a young Muslim girl that worked there said. She also called her a “f*g” because she liked girls. The girl I am talking about is 16. Mary and John started bullying another coworker of mine. One day, said coworker made a date nut cake but was allergic to walnuts so she had everyone taste it and give her feedback, it was delicious! the owners sat the cake on her work table with a note stuck on top of it. It had a drawing of a face throwing up and it said “GAG!” And then Mary went around and told everyone there that my coworker didn’t know how to bake and everything she made tasted like dog shit. I was fuming. When my closest coworker went on vacation i knew it would be a very stressful week without him and I probably wouldn’t make it through without walking out. My bf and I were working in the back when Mary came up to me and gave me a recipe for a cream cheese filling she wanted me to make. It was literally just heavy whipping cream, sugar, corn starch and 6 QUARTS OF EGGS! I couldn’t believe she thought this would work. It was then I knew, I was done. I made the “cheese” filling how she wanted, All of my pastries I made with that filling were ruined and the filling baked exactly how you would think it would. It was soup. I then waited for her to do what she always did, come criticize everything I baked that day. When she told me I made the kolackys too big (they were the same size as always.) I just smiled and said “okay :)” then walked away. I normally would have apologized and told her I would do better but now I was done being insulted. She came up to me a little later that day and wanted to know why there was so much tension. I started explaining that I wanted to be properly compensated for my time and not bothered off the clock. she said “so you mean I can’t even text you A QUESTION??” And she started getting loud with me. She was yelling at me “I HAVE A REAL PROBLEM WITH THAT!” I stated I wanted Friday to be my last day and I walked away. She left and 20 minutes later started texting me that she wanted me to reconsider and that she thinks it’s all my boyfriends fault that I’m so stressed out! My boyfriend did absolutely nothing wrong and the only reason she would think anything like that is if someone else(John) was telling her these things. I was livid. I wrote her a to do list and stuck it on her desk, it said:
TO DO FOR MARY:
Fix pizza oven.
Clean DIRTY bakery.
Find someone new to blame.
Close business!
I also wrote a bunch of notes that said “GAG!!”And drew some puking faces like🤮 and put it on the pastries that had her disgusting “cheese filling” in them. I know I stooped to her level, but I wanted to. And I’m glad I did. I said my goodbyes to my coworkers and walked out with my bf and had no intention of going back. When she got back to the bakery, she sent me about 20 texts. She accused me of lying about her husband touching me, she said I was making it up and he is a nurse and not a pedophile. That alarmed me because I never accused him of being one and don’t know where that came from!!! She told me if I didn’t get back with the key to the shop (I forgot I had one) in 39 minutes, she would be charging me and my bf for changing the locks, $600 a piece, my boyfriend never received a key. I was scared to go back but I wanted to give them the key. So I called the non emergency line and requested an officer be present while returning it, I more so wanted to document giving it back because she likes to sue people and I wasn’t going to risk her lying and trying to sue me or charge me for something so stupid. She was PISSED when I showed up with the cops but she knew she couldn’t do anything because they were standing there. She said she would be mailing our checks but when I got in my car she texted me and said she would be deducting the price of the paddle I broke from my last paycheck. $745 which conveniently is the same amount that she owes my bf and I collectively for our last paychecks. I told her if she does I would take her to small claims court because that’s what the police officer told me I can do if it comes to that but after posting in r/legaladvice I see that I should now contact the labor board. I also know that Mary pays everyone else there under the table so I’m ratting her out for that too. My boyfriend and I have received nothing in the mail and have contacted her multiple times over the course of the last week. We are sending out our wage complaints tomorrow and we already called the health department on her and I found out from a coworker that he came shortly after and she was throwing a fit lol. This was without a doubt a nightmare experience from start to finish, the only good to come of it is that it scared me into going back to school. Just thought I’d share my horror story. Sorry it was so long.