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Antiwork

Stingy owner’s plan to get teenagers to work for him for free backfired horribly (a tale from my youth)

When I was 19(F) I worked as a bartender for below minimum wage at a shit restaurant where the owner or manager was never present. (Don't ask me why I took the job for such ass pay, okay, I thought being a bartender at 19 would give me street cred or something lol) The idea was that we get paid significantly less, but we could take stock and then just get it subtracted from our (already abysmal) wages. In my country we have tipping culture, so the owner reckoned we would make enough money from tips alone. He was wrong, because customers hardly ever came there, because his restaurant was ass. This restaurant was so horrible, it was infested with roaches, we never had enough cutlery, the sun literally was so hot that it melted the plastic on the barstools because the layout was so stupid and the owner was…


When I was 19(F) I worked as a bartender for below minimum wage at a shit restaurant where the owner or manager was never present. (Don't ask me why I took the job for such ass pay, okay, I thought being a bartender at 19 would give me street cred or something lol)

The idea was that we get paid significantly less, but we could take stock and then just get it subtracted from our (already abysmal) wages. In my country we have tipping culture, so the owner reckoned we would make enough money from tips alone. He was wrong, because customers hardly ever came there, because his restaurant was ass.

This restaurant was so horrible, it was infested with roaches, we never had enough cutlery, the sun literally was so hot that it melted the plastic on the barstools because the layout was so stupid and the owner was too stingy to install blinds or AC. At one point we only had 3 whiskey tumblers left, and when we asked the owner to please buy glasses, he told us to serve the customers their drinks in coffee mugs.

Meanwhile this mf was driving around town in sports cars. At our Christmas end of year staff party we received our Christmas bonuses to thank us for all of our hard work: an entire rotisserie chicken each. I fucking kid you not. I wish I was joking.

We got tired of this treatment so we all decided to leave at the same time. But before that, for a few weeks while searching for new jobs, we would just blast nightcore remixes of Die Antwoord and get wasted all night. Management and owner were never there, so they had no idea why we weren't making a profit, we simply told them people weren't coming in. We racked up huge debt from the owner by drinking all of his booze, but he never made us sign contracts (because he paid us so far below minimum wage which was illegal) so he never reported us for theft, because then he would have to admit to authorities that he used us as slaves.

We all quit unanimously and the restaurant closed because of it. When I say quit, what I mean is we just left, because technically we never worked there to begin with.

How this guy came to be the owner of a restaurant in the first place is beyond me, because he had some of the worst business practices I had ever seen. Imagine thinking you can trick a bunch of drunk, delinquent teenagers into working for you for free and then getting outwitted by them lol what a moron. What ever made him think we would stay? I do not comprehend the logic to this day.

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