Warning for a very long rant, a lot happened here and I honestly probably missed a lot as well. I just know this is a very beloved company and I want to shed light on the way they treat their employees.
So, I worked at Trget for about 3 years. I was in the Strbucks, and my experience started off pretty positive. I believe I began working there around 2018, before I realized what a living wage was, and I was pretty excited about making $15/hr while living with my parents.
Basically I moved away for a few months, and ended up moving back after a difficult breakup and resumed my job there. Thats when shit hit the fan. Our original manager was fired because an employee recorded him saying the n word on his snap story and sent it to HR, and lo and behold, corporate sent two managers to replace him who were (arguably) less racist, but way worse managers.
One of them, lets call him Andrew, was like tweedle fucking dumb. Never communicated anything with anyone, never did anything in a sensitive way, trying to explain reason to him was like talking to a brick wall. We had a team member at the cafe who was pregnant, who had been working through morning sickness for months and never called out. One morning she almost passed out because she got so hot, and left because he wasn’t available to get permission from. He pulled our assistant lead aside and told him “Being pregnant is not an excuse”. I once went to Andrew to tell him I was worried about working with a coworker I suspected may have covid, because said coworker was hacking up a lung and hyperventilating into a bag in the stock room every few minutes. He told me “We can go talk to him together” and mind you, this coworker was INCREDIBLY petty and took it as a personal attack, after I had told Andrew that he would. It ruined our friendship, and most of my other coworkers turned against me because he told all of them I was being a snitch (I have had a lot of coworkers I don’t like and would never sabotage a blue collar worker, but this was a matter of our health and customers’ health).
The other, we’ll call him Bob, was two faced as HELL. He would always be so kind to our faces but behind the scenes he was pulling all the strings like some sort of supervillain. You’d report things to him and leave feeling confident something would be done to fix it, and it would never happen. He once brought his wife in for a tour of our store and called us “my workers”. If you’ve ever worked for this company you know they’re always spewing that “we’re a team, not employees!” bullshit, which made it even more cutting. He was black, but would say the most racist things to the other black people at the store. He once told a girl who wore a head wrap over her locs most days to “take that thing off your head”. My friend got in trouble once for getting into a verbal confrontation with some proud boys marching through the store with a confederate flag because they called her the n word within an ear shot. She was suspended for it, and when she came back he asked her “why is it always you in the middle of these things?” as if her reaction was not justified and even pretty tame considering.
I got in trouble for using my phone in the bathroom, and I stopped after that but like I said, I worked in the cafe and was drinking coffee all day every day, so duty called…sometimes for 10-15 mins, and I would be interrogated by my coworkers about what I was doing every single time I used the restroom (Yes I know this is illegal but the HR department was a fucking joke as well). It got to the point that I had serious anxiety about the amount of time I took in the bathroom at work.
When covid happened, the store never shut down, and we were not allowed to police our mask policy. We were allowed only 2 baristas behind the counter at once, but they would schedule more of us so 1-2 people had to find bullshit busy work to do elsewhere in the store, even if the people behind the counter were struggling with lines. At one point they decided they needed to crack down on our customer service despite us having the highest connection and drink satisfaction scores in the district. They came up with the brilliant idea to schedule 2 people for orders and drinks, and one person to walk around the cafe talking to people and “making connections”. Remember this is during the height of Covid, and they thought instead of keeping us behind the counter, restricting the spread of germs to a team of 7 people, they would send one of us out to interact with the mostly unmasked customers to then bring all those germs back behind the counter to potentially infect all of us.
We had a good HR rep at one point, but she was promoted and replaced with someone we’ll call Kate. On multiple occasions I tried going to her to report something or ask questions and she almost always had another manager in her office just gossiping, and if you interrupted she would look at you like a leper and tell you to “tell someone else”. Sometimes I /would/ go tell someone else and they would tell me it was her job to handle. When my friend applied for a job there, Kate told them “you better work hard since we’re paying you $15/hr!” like dangling a carrot in front of a horse…Our old rep told me that many employees had come to her saying they wished she was still the HR rep because Kate was that reluctant to do her job.
TLDR; Bullseye company is super evil, thinks they can dehumanize and micromanage employees and commit HR violations because they have competitive pay.
The story has a happy ending though, because I eventually got fed up and a $20/hr event serving position basically fell into my lap. I called Bob on a Saturday as my shift was starting and told him I was leaving for a job that pays more and he should consider treating his employees better. Never looking back unless its to be a union rep 🫣
I’d love to hear anyone else’s experience with this company. Viva la revolution comrades 🤝