I have worked for Natural Grocers for a little over a year and at first I really liked it. I came from Safeway and the contrast was amazing at first. They seemed like a company that had standards for their products and also really cared about their employees. No job is perfect of course and the pay left a lot to be desired, but they had other benefits like extra money towards food, community resources, and all sorts of free nutrition learning and resources. We even got a free item once a month that often times was an expensive vitamin. I liked my job and planned on working there until I could go back to school.
However, in the last month things turned around completely. HR came to the store to investigate- I’m not sure what because as far as I knew everyone I worked with was doing their job right and no one had any complaints about the management, but there was a rumor that someone was talking about unionizing. Natural Grocers is known to union bust and spend lots of money trying to keep unions from forming. However, I never heard of anyone trying to start a union in our store, most of us were aware of their union busting and also there had been a training for managers on how to prevent unions. Anyway, after HR came in, our once peaceful store was turned upside down. The upper management came in and corporately transferred our store manager as well as firing our assistant. This caused much uproar and many people quit. As the dust settled from that, the firings began.
At first I thought they were just cleaning up people who were not following store policies. Some of the people they fired first had been late or had ongoing issues in their departments. However, they began firing people that to my knowledge had not done anything wrong, or if they had they were still new and probably just in need of corrective action. Natural Grocer’s own policy according to the company handbook is that any corrective action will be first to try and fix the incorrect behavior and there is a due process of employees getting warnings and write ups before they are fired. They obviously were throwing this policy out the window.
They called me into the office one day and accused me of time theft. I had been talking to a coworker for longer than normal one day. However, I knew when they were talking about and explained that we had been talking about the training my coworker (one of the new hires) was doing and also about some of the changes to store management and what that meant for us. They told me that if that person had questions I should have directed them to one of the upper management that were in our store, however, our conversation was in the open and one of those upper management people was right there. If we were talking too long or talking about things they had answers to, they could have intervened right then. I also was unaware of the store policy on talking and because we were talking about work I thought the warning would be the end of it.
The next day I came in I was fired within minutes of being there. They cited the talking as time theft and let me go. They encouraged me to apply for unemployment and to contest it if denied, stating that they do not involve themselves in the process in any way and will not tell unemployment why I was fired.
I was shocked but not surprised after how things had been going. I definitely thought I’d be written up a few times before they let me go if they did. At first I was sure that even though I was unaware of the store policy, I had been in the wrong for talking on the clock. I had never been in trouble for it before and always kept my conversations to a minimum but I felt I had clearly made a mistake. But 10 minutes after I left, another manager walked out next to me. They were fired after 5 years, never was late, never had a write up- also fired for something they had no idea was a problem. I don’t know the full details of their supposed issue but it had definitely been pulled out of thin air. They went against their own stated policy again, instead of offering corrective action they fired the manager with no warning.
They have fired or transferred almost 10 people at this point. I think maybe they are about to close the store or are trying to replace all of the staff. They would not give us any information about why the changes are occurring but something is definitely going on. The way they treated us in the end was abysmal. I have never been fired from a job before and am certain they found some way to fire me so maybe they didn’t have to pay me severance? I don’t know enough about it for sure but something is definitely off. I will be surprised if they keep any of the staff I worked with and if the store remains open. I had heard that NG treats their employees poorly but I had never seen proof until 2 weeks ago.
TLDR I was fired from Natural Grocers for something I didn’t know was even a policy, they are firing the entire staff of my store.