For context, I used to work at a place we'll just call Mall-Wart. It was awful.
I was a stocker/truck unloader. Sounds simple enough. I unloaded the freight, then I stocked it.
Nope.
First, our team unloaded the trucks. This was about a 4 hour process, as we didnt have a motorized conveyer belt and we had to push everything down manually, then put it onto the correct carts/pallets. Which is a lot more demanding than it sounds.
Then, we were tasked with stocking the products, something that took longer than the company would have liked. Carts are stocked to the brim with 50-100 items in the worst cases. (It was always the worst cases.) And we would usually have about 15-25 of these carts. They wanted us to do these carts in about 30 minutes. Not impossible, but incredibly difficult as the number of items on each cart wildly varied. It usually took us an hour to do each cart. Couple that with the fact we only had about 5 people on a good day (there were about 9 total on the crew in my time.) So on our absolute BEST days (9 people/30 minutes on each cart/only 15 carts) yes, we'd be able to do it.
If it wasn't for the Remix, which is an entirely different truck that arrives with around 10 pallets of different things ,5-6 of which we needed to unwrap, load onto more carts, and go stock. If we couldn't finish this in the 8 hour shifts we had, we couldn't leave until it was done.
All the while we had managers breathing down our throats that always complained we were never fast enough. Boy I always wondered why we couldn't get everything done we were supposed to with 3 people on a Saturday (our busiest days).
BUT WAIT! There's more!
Then we had to do audits, which was scanning hundreds of individual items on our overstock shelves to go stock! Then we would take the overstock we had at the end of the day and print more labels to put them on the shelves! Which they pretty much completely relied on ME for, as well as to do my other duties before I left.
That's not even mentioning helping customers in between all this!
And they always blamed us for everything. There were about 4 managers, a person in HR, and the store owner on the dayshift. 2 of the managers, the store owner, and the person in HR were close on personal levels. They were basically all best friends, and were constantly working against us. We couldn't lodge a single complaint against any of them without the others hearing. One of the managers had apparently been investigated 4 separate times by the much higher ups because of employee complaints, but nothing came of it. So we were all kinda fucked when it came to reporting abusive behavior. (Like them berating us every 5 minutes and one of the managers literally telling us all we were all stupid.)
I quit this job about a year ago, and am now working in a restaurant. Not the cushiest job, but I dont miss it.
But it has recently come to my attention that they are interested in rehiring me, and it puts me in an interesting position. I'm curious if I could negotiate some sort of better wage/treatment and work hours to come back, but I'm not sure how I'd negotiate that and I'm wondering if it's even worth it.
I'd love to hear if anyone has any ideas on what I could do to convince them, and if there are any specific negotiation strategies to get what I want.