I say this because I feel like the work, or quitting work story, I have here simply beggars all possible suspension of disbelief and I would like to share it to see if others are as bewildered by this shit as I am:
I work in retail for a grocery store and the last few months have been exceptionally difficult due to the store manager and his rampant incompetence. Constantly flipping and flopping on decisions within minutes of making them, sometimes even calling up the boss over at night crew in the middle of the night to sharply change course and it has been very disruptive to the store's productivity. This last month was especially rough and has severely strained everyone in the store, especially the grocery department where I work. I primarily handle the counting and stocking of any stock that we have in excess but most of the days of the last month I have not been able to do so which has compounded our problems. So we work a bunch of stock onto the floor, are then directed to shuffle existing stock on the floor around the store while we have anywhere from six to ten u-boats full of backed up stock.
Compounding our woes is the fact the same store manager is doing whole sale counts and is consistently and persistently getting them wrong. Egregiously wrong. Last week in the soda aisle there were twelve tags of product that were empty on the shelf, with zero reserve of said products in the back that were left over, and this dude marked ten out of twelve of them as having at least half a shelf (from 9, 12,16,22 were some of the exact counts with a shelf cap of 20 per item). And when he's not putting in number for imaginary products he is counting products that are overstocked (talking in particular one product that refuses to sell that is currently stacked at fifteen out of a shelf cap of eight) and undercounting what is in literal plain sight for any human with eyes with which to see could tell. Then we get more unsellable product that clogs up the back and the cycle goes on.
All of this is to paint a small, but descriptive, image of the sheer fuckery and discord that he has been inflicting on the store with his staggering incompetence. In spite of his best efforts though this last week and a half, shortly after Thanksgiving, we finally managed to put out all the fires and stabilize the store. Just in time as well as with Christmas on the horizon it is going to be a hell of a month for us but now it's manageable. And that's when he pulled out his trump card it would seem as he has now decided to axe the hours of 75-85% of the store's workers for the next week, leading into Christmas, to zero. Evidently he heard us all relieved about getting things caught up to speed and optimistic about being able to crank out this next month's shipments onto the floor and took that as a 'hold my beer' moment.
We have ONE full time worker dedicated to working grocery load with support from only four half shifts, collectively, from two other workers. And that is making the rather bold assumption any of them stay for this fucking mess. Because they are not cancelling ANY shipments to the store during this time. This little maneuver, to steal a quote, is going to cost us weeks if not MONTHS of trouble because we will have an overwhelming amount of unworked freight effectively blocking off the entire back aisle and filling the truck in the back to the brim. All while we continue to have new shipments pouring in.
Granted part of this is a corporate thing, they decided to cut payroll massively to where even with JUST the full timers in the store we were still hundreds of dollars over payroll. That could feasibly be excused of course, assuming ignorance of the way the corpo world works, if not for this e-mail one of my grocery bosses showed me from the CEO… boasting about having bought five new stores for the company. We can buy new stores but we can't pay for our workers to work the shit WE OURSELVES ordered? Interesting. What's even more interesting was, and I shit you not, literally as me and my boss were expressing our 'displeasure' at this situation we got a truck with a single case on it. Perplexed my boss goes to open it and find… drum roll… a brand. Spanking. New. Desk. For the front office. That desk alone could have paid for half the night crew's hours to work freight for the week. The four lockers in the back could have paid the other half with change that have been sitting in their boxes for several weeks as there is quite literally no place to put them. Priorities.
Then, to add insult further to injury, the store manager decides to frame this as 'doing us all a favor' and 'sticking up for us by sticking it to corporate and force them to increase the payroll budget'. All the while he keeps his hours, which could have paid for half the night crew to do loads. And guess who has been bragging about going to get a new Mercedes for Christmas while the majority of the store isn't going to get a paycheck before Christmas? You'd be forgiven if you thought this was all part of some comedic antiwork satire. Then, as if to compound the problem, the grocery heads have been fighting to get HR to investigate and terminate this buffoon and finally convinced them of the gravity of it and they were coming down this week on Wednesday to address the matter but then, suddenly, on the day of they decided to schedule it for a better time, after they got wind of the situation currently, until AFTER all of this was put into effect. How very convenient.
But wait… there's more! Turns out this store manager has only been with the company for TWO YEARS. Slightly longer than I have been actually, and has been bounced from FOUR DIFFERENT STORES. And this store, which he has been at for just under one year, is the longest he has been in a single position. He was getting booted almost quarterly by every other store and they still have given him chance, after chance, after chance. And the final nail in the coffin: This all means that on the week of my wedding, of which I planned to use that money to pay bills so there was no concern for them while on me and my wife's honeymoon, I am not getting a paycheck. And she is currently getting in with a new job so now we have a whole week with no pay and bills that will be due then and we have to dedicate most, if not all, of our honeymoon funds to bills instead.
I can tolerate a lot of bullshit but this is a league above 'any bullshit' and I just wanted to share this story for others with a message: Don't take it. Do not take this bullshit lying down. Many may not have much choice and I know many deal with worse but you are worth more than that. Don't let these corpos strip your humanity and make you believe you are just another number on a quarterly spreadsheet. You are worth more than that and you deserve better.