TL:DR When will companies realize people feel more appreciation when they get a decent raise of at bare minimum an extra dollar an hour. Screw the “holiday parties” and the non-guaranteed bonuses. A 2% raise for barely taking any unscheduled days off and busting your ass every day is BS and has only motivated me more to go back to getting a bigger raise by finding a new job.
So I joined this company in 2021 after a very crappy 2020 of getting laid off, getting good unemployment money, getting forced back to work for only 32 hours a week(less than I was paid on unemployment), quitting working for 3 months for sanity reasons(401k money used to pay bills), 401k ran out so had to find a job in crap job market during covid, ended up part time at UPS for a month. Then I made the mistake of working for a certain company named after a rainforest in South America, 17.50 an hour as a seasonal guy, drops down to 15.50 an hour immediately after December 31. Apply for a job at PepsiCo get turned down so accept a job for 17.50 an hour at company I currently work at.A Couple months go by they restructure the pay to move up to $20 an hour. This is awesome, the next year should be even better now that I moved into the production aspect of the job making the products that make the company money. Let me tell you a 42 cent raise makes me want to take 2 quarters, throw them on the big bosses desk and tell him “you guys must need this more than me, cheap f****”. If this was 10 years ago it'd be okay because we wouldn't be getting as screwed over by rising costs as we are now.