Finally getting around to getting the courage to post stuff. Long time lurker.
I worked at a restaurant from 2008 to 2019. I originally loved it there, for all the good reasons. Good people working there, great customers, food was good(back then, anyways). The problem was, as it is in many restaurants, management.
The last general manager I worked under, and our area director, to be specific. The GM did all the usual stuff that most hated restaurant managers do: scheduled herself with all the employees on her shifts, cut corners on the food prep, fudged her inventory numbers to look good for her boss, pencil-whipped the temperature logs, pilfered through the employees’ bags while they were working, snooped through their phones, all that jazz. Safe to say, when she wasn’t around, my crew and I managed to at least have decent nights and get most of our stuff finished without issue.
The last year I was there, we’d already been having staffing problems. She’d already been through several assistant GMs(in between shift leader and GM), and I had expressed interest in that position for years. She either offered that position to people off the street, or looked around at other stores in our area. I had also been asking for a pay raise, since I was only making $11 after being there a decade. I went to her with two other employees, two high schoolers that had worked their butts off over the past year, to ask about raises. We were told, with a little disdain in her voice, that we didn’t deserve raises and that the only way we would get a pay bump was if we “got our shit together” and got promoted. Great support system.
The final straw came in May of 2019. I was getting ready to take a week off for paid vacation. I was determined not to let work mess it up, because I had been forced to reschedule my previous vacation because GM decided that she was going on vacation the same week I was, and that hers took priority because “you’re just going to stay here. I’m going to insert beach name”. I got a text message the Wednesday before, and of course it was GM, saying I had to come in because she had a kidney stone. Okay, it’s one or two days, tops. I’m good to still do my vacation.
Wrong-o. The next day, her boss Area Director called me. “Looks like GM is gonna be out for at least a week. I don’t know what you’ll do about your vacation. You’re going to have to work it.” This was a problem, because the only store management we had at the time was me, and a girl that had just come back to the store and didn’t have a lick of management experience. “If you need help, let me know,” and he hung up. Yes, dude, I need help! You just ruined my vacation, you know I’m the only person in the store that can open it and close it, and you can’t take it upon yourself to send me another manager to help?
Obviously, he didn’t. I had to order trucks, which I did know how to do, and I also had to make schedules and do the Weekly inventory, which I had no experience doing. When I say “experience”, what I mean is I didn’t know how to fudge the numbers to make AD happy. Two Mondays, I did the counts. Both times, I gave him the real numbers. I even added on the second one that I’m not going to fudge the numbers to make him happy; he sounded appalled that I would even suggest it, but there wasn’t any other way GM was giving him correct counts.
Thursday of the second week, surprise health inspection. I had no idea that the AD wasn’t aware that our water heater wasn’t working, that our sink’s sanitizer pump was broken, and the walk-in cooler was acting up; I had assumed he knew since he had visited three weeks before.(we had a dishwasher that heated its own water, so we were still getting everything cleaned) Inspector gave us an 80; I let her know that I would have to let my AD know, since I had no authority to get those problems fixed. Of course the AD raked me over the coals, and GM finally messaged me to chew me out, even though she’d been radio silent for most of the time she was out. She hadn’t checked on us since she took off, she was on Facebook most of the time but had her bf let us know she was “on painkillers and out of it” and couldn’t check on us.
Eleven days I worked open to close, most of those night I left around midnight if not later. I had one day off, and that’s only because I stayed extra late to filter the grease and do extra food prep for other shift leader. AD sent a shift leader from another store on the slowest day we had, for 6 hours, and that was his effort in helping.
Third Monday, GM came back, and left at noon when I came in. Didn’t say a word to me, not a “thank you”, not a “good job holding it down”, nothing. I was exhausted, my stress levels were through the roof, and I wasn’t getting any sort of compensation for the almost two weeks I worked myself to near death. AD thought it was a grand idea to ask one of my employees, who had stepped down a year before as shift leader, to take it up again for a $5 raise. Said employee came to me and asked what he should do. I was just floored, I didn’t know anything to say except to not do it, it’ll be him next time something like this happens.
That night, I wrote out a letter of immediate resignation. I let my coworkers know I wasn’t coming in, I left my uniforms, manager cards, and keys on the counter, locked the doors back up with the lockbox key, and taped the resignation letter on the door. I then proceeded to block GM, her bf, her mother and sister, and her bff, on all channels.(she ended up messaging my mom to ask why I quit and why I didn’t talk to her, her bf actually emailed me and was asking me why I would bail on the store like that)
I’m sure there are people reading this and saying, “what a shitebag, he left the GM alone after she had a medical problem”, and I only have this to say: after watching GM threaten employees with termination for calling out sick, especially one that had food poisoning, and another that had had surgery, I didn’t feel that bad about it. She was still phishing for stories about me from the employees after I left, since she knew I was close with a few of them. She actually told one of them that she was planning to give me the AGM position, but I quit without warning; I saw this as an attempt to get me to crawl back and beg her for a job.
I often wonder if I should have at least reached out and discussed why I left, but there’s no building that bridge back.
Tl;dr shift leader quits after almost two weeks of 18+hr days, Gm and ad practically left shift leader with a sinking ship