Well, with popularity of antiwork, I figured I'd toss my experience into the mix. I'd say almost every one of us has at least some small story to tell because of how widespread awful management is. This is my story.
I worked at a grocery store and rose to the rank of what is called a “Frozen Coordinator“, though my associates and I jokingly referred to it as a “glorified grunt”. Even though I ran the place (the frozen department), did the door plans, the miniscule amount of office work, and trained people, 99% of what I did was what everyone else was doing: unloading the truck, putting the truck up, and doing scans at the end of the day.
The amount of people you can have in your department is based upon the hours corporate has allotted your department to have. With this being one of the largest grocery stores in the state, and making the most money out of them all, you'd think I've have a big crew right? Nope: 120 hours. That meant only 3 full time people. Grocery stores are open 7 days a week, so once you spread three employees out over 7 days, you have only two people working any given day and only one day where you get all three. I should also mention, for my fellow frozen employees who may be reading this, that most stores do not get a delivery every day. Some only get 3 per week. I had a full truck every single day since this was the #1 store in the state, and each one was massive.
Before I had been given this position, the managers had told me of how they ran through a whopping seven coordinators within the span of only two years. One lady opened the freezer door (in the back), took one look at the inside, then promptly walked out and quit. The freezer was so packed full of items, you couldn't even walk in. Often, it was the case that the truck wouldn't be put up all the day, so you had pallets left over, unfinished. The inventory was wildly off, the shelves had holes everywhere where product wasn't stocked. The department was a mess.
So, in I come, and long story short, I clean the place up. Inventory is fixed, you can walk around in the freezer, the shelves are stocked, and the reviews from happy customers start coming in. Everything runs fairly smoothly for about two years, but around the end of that time, one of my guys decides it's his time to become a coordinator himself at the store the next town over. He leaves and I wish him well. Then, my other guy, who has been dealing with health problems, quits. Suddenly, I am alone.
I end up working 7 days a week for two months straight. I'm pulling 96 hour weeks. Amazingly, everything is getting done. I am a very efficient worker. The one great thing about it is that I end up looking like superman because everyone in the store knew what the department used to look like before I came along, and here I am running the entire thing alone and still keeping it up. But, all things must come to an end.
Because of the extreme hours I was pulling, I ended up being #1 in overtime hours for the district. If you're #1 on that list, the managers really start breathing down your throat to get you off that list. To their credit, the management at this store had been pretty swell. They let me do my own thing and I never had a problem with them. The problem was that I was still the only person working in this department. I'm supposed to have 120 hours, yet they are telling me to reduce my 96 hours, while giving me zero extra help. You must understand that even 96 hours is barely cutting it to get everything done. Anything less and you begin running into problems like not being able to put the entire truck up, purposely not ordering large enough trucks, scans not getting done, back-stock not being run, etc. No one seemed to care or acknowledge that though. So, I gave them what they wanted. I dropped down to 40 hours a week.
As expected, everything got behind. How could I possibly catch everything back up? It was killing me just barely keeping the department going at 96 hours. Simple math will tell you that if you are 56 hours short (96 hrs down to 40) for two weeks in a row, you have to somehow put those hours back in somewhere in the future. I honestly felt defeated. I began imagining what people would say about my department, even though it wasn't my fault. It was beginning to look like crap again. I felt like my hands were tied. There was no returning from the hole they had dug for me.
And so, I quit. I honestly enjoyed working there, even with the 96 hour work weeks. What I cared the most about was “being superman”. “The guy who saved the frozen department”. That's what I wanted. I had never had a job like this before where I was given the chance to prove myself. Not giving me the employees I needed and then not allowing overtime for myself, the only employee left, took that joy away. Feeling pride in your work I think is an important element in the day to day work you do, but now even that was gone. This is why I quit.
I went back a year later to check the department out. It was in shambles once again. The biggest takeaway I had from the whole experience was that corporate is simply not in tune with what the workers are doing out on the floor. If they tell the store management I have to cut my hours, there's nothing the store management can do. Store management was, however, definitely at fault for not giving me two more associates. Profits for the department increased while I was at the helm. Why was my well-being not a concern? Now I'm gone and they are making less money. The biggest WTF is this: the amount of extra money I made the department EASILY made up for the amount of overtime I was doing.
But oh well. Anyway, that's my story of how a grocery store lost a good employee. I decided to go into programming instead.