I worked at my vet clinic for 4 years. It was in a prestige neighborhood, but other vet offices were paying their employees significantly more than what my place was paying. The funny part is that my hospital made the most money and charged extremely more than any other vet office in the area. It never made sense to any of us how we were pulling in extremely high numbers each quarter while being told they couldn’t afford to give people a raise. Needless to say, no matter how nice our bosses were, we got tired of not being compensated appropriately. We all had bills to pay. A good chunk of their small practice wound up leaving. They are about to lose all but 2 of their remaining employees as well. We feel bad, but like I said—some of us lost our homes or were about to lose our home, so we had no other choice but to leave.
During my exit interview, I told my bosses (who have also been close family friend’s of mine for almost 20 years) that I just didn’t know how they were planning on keeping their doors open with the amount of staff they had lost all at once. I let them know that it wasn’t fair of them to brag about our financials and then refuse to give us a raise. I told them that they paid us significantly less than a McDonald’s employee for our area. They had several ad listings for employment on Indeed, and to my surprise, their pay range was listed at even less than what our starting pay used to be. I told them they weren’t going to find anybody willing to work for that kind of pay in this economy. I felt bad being so blunt, but they needed to hear it. It’s almost like they’re trying to purposely run their business into the ground at this point.