I work at a retail store and my shift hours have been insane.
My hours have me working until 5:30pm and then the next day I am scheduled to work the 5AM-9AM merchandising shift which always starts with a 30 minute Dale Carnegie style speech. My company is obsessed with that 60's style teambuilding. I just want to scream “can we stop talking and just start opening the boxes, we are already behind.” You have to be there ready precisely at 5am which means getting there early to prepare.
The break structure is weirdly regimented to where there are one-on one-off breaks where everybody sits alone for 15 minutes in the breakroom. Going to the bathroom involves announcing over the radio that “I am going off the floor and I will do a bathroom check”.
What really got me was the “mandatory holiday meeting”, this was to introduce us to the store's holiday campaign, it was this Sunday at 7PM for three hours. My previous shift was 5AM and my next one was 6AM. We set the store up for the holiday campaign the week before and we had some confusion during setup and we could have used the direction.
Even crazier is that the store manager is a “Contract Lecturer” at a local college, and the meeting was on campus instead of at the store! I am a contract employee by the way.
I was in fact hired to work daytime floor sales and cash and over the the next two weeks I have just one 3 hour 45 minute shift (if it was four hours I would be entitled to a 15 minute break.) I am not scheduled to work at all over Black Friday and neither is the store manager.
Minimum wage.