TL;DR
Was demoted at no fault to my own due to company restructuring. Cutting my pay in half, and wanting me to produce MORE. I'm effectively making less per hour than when I was hired 4 years ago due to inflation.
I've been with this company for 4 years. Have had a few pay raises and promotions along the way. This is the longest tenure of my career (turning 30 soon) and overall been a pretty good fit for me.
I started managing a smaller retail store 2 years ago (total head count of 3 including me). The company makes lots of little changes all the time, and a few big changes every year. What a crashing ship tbh.
I'm in retail sales, and they removed a good 60% of all their store managers nationwide.
Then they rehired through another interview process for the “senior position”. But it's a completely different pay structure and hourly rate.
Generally my responsibilities really don't change, I'm still leading at the store, (there's only 2 of us now). The only difference is I'm not in “charge of” hiring, training or creating schedules.
They want me to produce twice as much to make less than I was making before. And looking at the math Is actually LESS then when I was initially hired on in an entry level position in 2019 (when considering inflation).
I would of walked away weeks ago, but I wanted to procure a job offer before I left. So far I've received 5 different job offers out of 8 interviews. All of them (including some with previous uppermanagement that left to different companies bc of all these changes) have denied me due to the felony on my record. Even with some of them advocating on my behalf.
Luckily the felony is now expungeable, but it'll take several months for the paperwork to clear through the court systems.
Ideally I want to be able to collect unemployment for a little while and then move on to one of those better offers when my record clears.
For more clarification
I work in an “at will state” (utah) and won an award in March for being #7 nationwide for best store operations. Currently am ranked #1 on Google in my county (there's like 6 nearby)
But because we're under new leadership I have zero recognition for what I've brought/sacrificed to/for this company (pulling 60 hour weeks most of last year due to understaffed by several stores)
I'm just really frustrated, and increasingly angry and bitter about being a wage slave when I'm honestly more competent than most of the general public. I honestly didn't even make that much money, but I was on my way to having my best year (was aiming for 55k)
And now I make between $12-20 with the average being $15.
What would you do? Go work fast food for $12? Or stay and quite quit?