I recently quit my job as a barista, and there were a lot of reasons (the owner’s tendency to take his anger out at the employees who literally hadn’t done anything wrong being a big one) and here were some of the final straws (for context, this was an independently owned cafe.)
The owner would yell at us if we ever stood idle. This was a pretty common occurrence because, since I had to remain at the front of house all the time, and sometimes there were long periods where no customers came in, I often literally ran out of stuff to do. Apparently this was my fault.
The baker came up from the back one morning and said that four cookies had come out ruined and she was going to toss them. She offered them to me instead. I took them and planned to share them with my coworkers. My boss saw them tucked away under the counter, told me I couldn’t take them, and threw them away in front of me.
But the real kicker is when I was closing up (no customers in the store) and had a cup of coffee, and my boss told me I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee in the cafe. This had literally never been a rule before, and since we had to work starting at 7am most days, obviously all the employees drank coffee throughout the day. He also implied that all of the employees were taking coffee without paying for it (we weren’t – even though we had no employee discount).
Glad I don’t work there anymore. That place was a mess.