I get managers not wanting workers to waste an entire day doing nothing especially since I work at a local small business. But the other day I had just gotten done helping a customer and like 30 seconds later one of my managers comes in to tell me restock everything right that second. We had just restocked mostly everything a few hours before. Another time me and one of my coworkers were doing a simple task as a two person job while there was no customers because shocking, we wanted to talk to each other. Then a manager decides to tell us she didn't want us doing that because it didn't need to be a two person job. Which it didn't need to but at least we were doing something and there were not any pressing tasks at that time. There's been so many times where managers will tell people some version of “why aren't you doing anything right now, go find something to do.” Plenty of times, especially on slow days, managers get at least a couple of hours to sit at their desks and answer phone calls or emails or something. While we are expected to keep as busy as possible which means standing for 10-11 hours most days. I'm also getting paid minimum wage, so this job is nowhere near worth that much effort. Minimum wage, minimum effort. My partial solution to this is to work slow on certain tasks so they keep me busy longer. Not too slow that people will complain but enough to kill some extra time.
Another weird thing my job has done is make the work week Wednesday-Tuesday so we can get paid on Fridays. Since no one has a regular schedule sometimes people work 5+ days in a row (10 hour shifts) without overtime pay because of the way the work week is. That just feels so scammy to me. I thought working for a small business would be better than corporations but they both suck. Thankfully this is just my summer job before school starts again.