I’ve been working for a small business since last year. All my coworkers are great, we love our job and it’s the first place I’ve ever worked that I haven’t just felt miserable going to. It really did feel like a work family – with no toxicity or anything.
And then our boss, who has spent the last ten years out of town, comes back. She fires the managers who have been running the store for her (her family). She comes in every day just to berate and scream at us for not having things displayed like she wants them to be – For example, she didn’t like the displays on a case and so she opened it and just absolutely destroyed it. This was an hour before we closed. She laughed at us for asking for our checks on time and told us we were being unreasonable. Now my checks are shorter because she doesn’t know how to do them (our manager did them before). She’s cutting hours for everyone. She keeps talking about how she wouldn’t lose anything from closing the store so we better work harder (the title is a quote from her). This is all only the tip of the iceberg, a post detailing everything about her would be multiple paragraphs long.
I’m just heartbroken. I wasn’t making great money, but it was a job I liked and it paid enough for me to get by. Now everyone is miserable, and we’re all looking for other jobs, but none are hiring. I can’t afford to just quit until I find a job, and working at what feels like a corpse of a place I used to love is just pure misery.
It all feels helpless. It feels like the rug was pulled out from under me. I had finally come to terms with not being able to catch a job with my degree, thinking “oh well, I may not make that much but at least it’s a job that pays my bills and makes me not hate myself.”
I don’t even know how to end this post. I have to go job hunting again after this. I just want to live in a world where I like my job and can afford to survive.