I don't want to give any concrete details here, but I worked at a pizza place in a college town where I made slightly above minimum wage and without any notice I got a phone call today informing me that the owner is permanently shutting down the restaurant effective immediately.
My manager, who is actually really nice, called me today in tears. She apologized profusely, telling me she only was just told by the owner, who we will call Johnny for the purposes of anonymity.
Johnny was a piece of trash since the moment I started there. When I got hired he told me two things: 1: After two months of work I could expect a 50 cent raise.
2: I would never be asked to stay later than 3:30 AM. The restaurant's liquor license said all customers and employees had to be out of the building by 3:30am, regardless of how much work was left.
As a broke college student who needs money and sleep, I accepted the position.
One month in Johnny simply left the state. He was impossible to reach, and all communication had to go through my aforementioned manager. Again, she was amazing, constantly fought for us, constantly hiring new people since we were always understaffed. More often than not when I wanted to talk to Johnny she would tell me that she'd try her best but if he didn't want to be reached she literally didn't have any recourse.
Two months in, I'm asking for my raise and getting nowhere. Manager always telling me that if she had the power to she would just give it to me, but Johnny won't return emails.
Four months of sustained texting (I know, I should have left by now, but I needed the job) and I finally got the raise.
Then, with no notice at all, we get a text saying that they got a new liquor license, now everyone is expected to stay until 5:00, sometimes as late as 7AM! Not even “Next week the schedule will change” just “from now on”. This happened the friday before Halloween! Saturday was Halloween night and I had a closing shift, that I was now expected to work up to three extra hours on with less than 24 hours notice, and so was everyone else.
That shift was a nightmare.
At this point, I'm doing everything I can. I'm making sure to cook as much food on the job as possible. “What's that? You already filled this order? Oh, well I guess there's some extra food here for all of us to eat during our shift”
Any time a new hire comes in I ask them how much they're making. They always look super wide-eyed at the question, but I tell them how much I'm making (more often than not, I'm making .50 more because I fought the guy for it) and they are immediately on board. I tell them to start asking for a raise as soon as possible and a few times they came back to me a while later saying they got the raise.
I take as many liberties as I can. If the owner isn't going to even dignify us with his presence, I'm gonna take everything I can get from this job. Every shift I made as much food for the rest of the people working there and made sure to let new hires know that by the contract they signed that they're allowed to make themselves meals too. Most of them didn't even know that when they were hired.
I also set my availability to end at 3:30 AM, and I stuck to that. I made sure to tell my co-workers on late nights that I would be leaving at 3:30, and when they asked why, I told them the truth. Most of them didn't realize they even had the option to do that.
It was insane to me how dedicated to this job some of my coworkers were. When things were busy and hectic I would take extra care when moving scalding hot pans through a crowded area and the amount of coworkers who unironically would say “just burn me, I don't care” was mind-boggling.
At the end of it all, a local charity group was supposed to do a fundraiser with the restaurant a couple days from now and as far as I know, they just got left hanging. I don't actually know if they got their money back or anything, but I know charity events need to be scheduled three weeks in advance, and that the business had been losing money for some time now, so I can only assume they knew this was a possibility when they agreed to do it, but again I don't have concrete info on that.
Tl:Dr I don't regret taking everything I could get from that job (metaphorically, I am not advocating for stealing or doing anything illegal), and if you are thinking of giving a shit about your job just know that they definitely don't give a shit about you.