I'm going to start by saying that I have been with this company for almost 3 years. My roommate/coworker has been there for almost 4 years. Neither of us have gotten a raise, we work for minimum wage ($12.75/hr) plus tips. My roommate was an admin for a while, so he got .50 more an hour when he was doing that. He was doing that for 2 stores and it was supposed one admin per store. He stepped down as it wasn't worth it to do the job of 2 people.
A month ago, our boss quit. She got tired of doing the jobs of 3 people by herself. She was a multi unit supervisor, so she did all of those duties and the duties of 2 admins by herself. They denied her a raise because she kept going over on her hours, her team knew she stressed, and things were falling behind. They also hired back ANOTHER employee that she said not to because they were fired for stealing. The first one she advised against was working while the store was robbed. She was fired a week later, after the police concluded an investigation. So she handed in her keys after they hired a guy that would charge people for beer, but never ring it in the till and just pocket the money. He got fired from one of our competitors when they caught him doing the same thing.
Now, the kicker here is that the other 4 stores in our region make more than us hourly, they're just one town over. Our 2 stores make more than 3 out of 4 of those stores in profit, we are currently having issues with employee retention, and I have had good applicants pull their application when they hear what we pay.
We need to fill 3 positions, but there are only 3 employees in the store willing and qualified to take the position. One is me(for admin), my roommate (for supervisor), and another very like minded coworker (other admin). We have all been approached multiple times, we have all turned it down for the same reason. We want the same wage as the other stores in our region for all of our employees. These positions are essential to keeping our stores running. For the first 3 weeks, we had our regional manager doing these jobs on the days she works, the other 2 days were being done by supervisors from the other 4 stores in rotation. They all got sick of it quick and went as far as to CREATE A FUCKING POSITION FOR MY ROOMMATE! They are currently paying him $16 an hour because he is handling the admin duties for both stores and not on the floor at all, so he doesn't make tips.
So the 3 qualified candidates have all had the same stipulation for taking the positions. We want the same rate as the rest of our region. Me and the other admin candidate said we will only do it if there is an admin at each store, we will only do the work for our individual store.
Our regional is currently in talks with our director of operations and assistant director of operations about a wage increase for our stores. If we have to, I will ask for a meeting with them to let them know what is happening in their stores right now and how we can get them running right. I have my fingers crossed. This would be huge for my team.