This happened right before the pandemic, but I love reading everyone's justified petty reasons for quiting their jobs, so I thought I'd share mine.
I worked at a coffee chain. Won't say the name, but you know the one. I absolutely loved my regular customers. I loved making the coffee, and I loved my coworkers. As it often is, management was the issue. See, this coffee place has a lot of policies about the store setups and company “vibe” in general, and a lot of the policies made on a corporate level, simply don't translate into the actual functionality of the store. Example policy 1:
We generally had two people on drive through at all times as long as we were staffed well enough (we often weren't.) The person taking the orders got a headset, and was supposed to put in all orders, and pass the drinks to the person at the window. Person at the window did NOT get a head set, which allowed them to communicate with everyone else in the store, and they were also forbidden from moving from that spot as they were supposed to “stay planted” and “engage meaningfully with the customer.” Nice idea, but when you're standing in the window for 5 minutes, talking to a customer, waiting on a single pastry that you KNOW is done cooking, but you aren't allowed to walk 4ft to go get it, it creates some problems. I was in that situation multiple times. The customer was literally ABLE TO SEE THE FOOD FROM THE WINDOW, and knew I wasn't getting it for them. When I would quickly go grab the last item on their order that no one else was handing me, I would get mildly chewed out for “not staying planted.” Ok. Fun. Thanks. That was one of many such issues.
About a month before I quit, corporate put out some new “store positioning instructions”, and our district manager, being the boot licker she was, took them REALLY seriously. These changes included rearranging EVERYTHING on the coffee bar area, and putting sauces and add ins in really strange places, that logically made no sense. It slowed down productivity to the max, because we had to reach over each other and dig to find the things we needed. The instructions ALSO dictated that is having 2 cold bar blenders was OBVIOUSLY FAR too many, and it needed to be reduced to one, with the second one being stored in a back room. (This was fucking rediculous. Every other drink we made was a frozen drink, we were a very busy store, and this change came two days before a “customer appreciation event” where people could get buy one get one cold drinks. -_-)
The last straw came when the manager saw in the new instructions that we weren't allowed to stack the cash drawers anymore. Each register had two cash drawers that were generally on top of each other, but since the DIRECTIONS CLEARLY stated we were NOT supposed to do that, (who tf knows why) she set them all side by side. Well, the issue with that is, if you had two people on drive through, with the drawers side by side, when you opened one of them, it would hit the legs of the person taking the orders. EVERY time you had to make change, you had to ask the other person to move out of the way. And that mf HURT if it hit your shins. It was rediculous, and after a coworker knocked over a drink while moving to the side, I slyly stacked them again, so we could get the fuck back to properly working. About an hour later, the district manager came back, saw the drawers stacked, and made us ALL stop working so she could chew us out over it. The instructions CLEARLY said they were not to be stacked, so we were not allowed to stack them you see! (Not other reasoning given. I would get it if they had a real reason, but no. Just that corpy worpy said not to.)
Called in ten minutes after my shift and quit, (sighting some real health issues I had, even though that wasn't really my reason.) I couldn't stand to work at a place that put corporate policies over basic common sense anymore. It was making all my coworkers miserable, and I wanted off that ship. Fun thing is, I got a free Spotify Premium membership through the company while I worked there, and it was canceled within 10 minutes of my call. They really cared about efficiency then.
Anyway, I work for myself now, and enjoy being able to work around my logical needs. I have tons of other stories from that job, including the time a coworker got serious, hospital level burns on the job due to corporate negligence, and she was expected back to work the next day. Thank fuck they are unionizing now.
Keep the petty stories coming my friends