Honestly, I don’t even know how to start this post.
I’m currently a student in London who’s part time waitressing to make ends meet in such an expensive city. Got a new job in a cute, slightly TikTok ‘famous’ cafe in Sept 2022 after moving apartments. Everything was great, the team were lovely at face value, I got along with pretty much everyone and the job ticked all of my requirements. The only thing is, I wasn’t trained to make coffee at the time, so I was strictly waitressing.
I didn’t mind, as they reassured me i’d be trained soon enough. Months passed and by November I still wasn’t trained, I considered myself to be close with the staff and we went out to multiple outings and dinners together, so I eventually brought my concerns up with the owner about wanting to get my training well underway so I could work more efficiently and also get more hours in, she told me that they would prioritise my training. To add further, I also asked about my training on multiple other occasions after this. It even got to the point where I was asking my partner if I could practise making coffee at his workplace.
Well… fast forward to last week, I was finishing up after an exhausting shift, sweeping the floor and minding my own business when one of my managers approaches me and asks to speak to me. She sat me down, told me that it would be my last shift with the company as they want to prioritise hiring people who are able to make coffee due to the Starbucks opening across the street and their ‘need to compete with them’… You can imagine everything I was thinking. She then went on to explain that I could “find a job ‘literally’ tomorrow If i wanted to.” Fair enough to say it has been quite a few tomorrows since and I have not found myself a job.
So essentially, I worked for a company for 5 months, created what I thought was a great relationship with them, and they fired me at the end of a random Friday shift with no notice whatsoever in the middle of an extreme cost of living crisis because they couldn’t be bothered to train me over the period of months of me begging to be trained. It finally caught up to them and it was easier for them to just fire me and hire someone else by then. The only thing the owner (whom I thought I was extremely close with) had to say to me as I was collecting my bag and getting ready to piss off out of the door forever was, “Sorry…”
Currently panicking on how im going to survive the near future, but the most valuable lesson this has taught me is, no matter how great you think your relationship with a company is, you are just a number at the end of the day and they do not care about your wellbeing whatsoever when it conflicts with the interests of their company. Welp… Even the modern and seemingly ‘progressive’ popular cafes today seem to still have abysmal treatment of their workers. Remember to be nice to your servers, you don’t know what they’re having to put up with in the workplace.