Hi,
I work in retail sales for a telecom company in Canada. I worked for about 6 months.
Two days ago I got a call from my regional manager saying they have decided to terminate me immediately after an investigation where I reported that I may have unknowingly sold to fraudsters. The cause being I broke the bond of trust between me and the company and violated company policy by conducting improper practices despite my “formal training” and acknowledgement of retail fraud prevention standards. The fraudsters would make the order with me, then somehow cancel their order and effectively get away with multiple high value phones while not being billed or tracked down (? don't really understand how but regardless)
The first incident occurred in what I believed was March/April (investigator found out it was actually February), about 2 months into my employment. Multiple incidents after that occurred where I sold to the customer's relatives and I was only able to find out after about the 5th sale, in June. I reported it promptly and tried to be as helpful as I could. They found out I did a lot of things wrong, like not validating accounts properly etc etc. They asked me why I didn't do this or that etc or how come I did this and I would say I can't remember because it was too long ago and I suppose I just didn't do it according to policies and procedure or they possibly deceived me when I did (like fraudulent ID, they did pass the credit and ID check after all somehow). In their termination letter they took that as evidence that I didn't follow policy but there is no evidence at all other than my assumption. Aside from that though I genuinely did not know because I was trained poorly and didn't know or was taught that there were so many standards.
To preface, when I started working the first thing I noticed is I was the only girl, and the only hispanic girl at that. All of the other guys were brown, born and raised as second gen immigrants in the nearby city. The manager was a temporary acting manager who was Chinese.
He was a great and friendly person but admittedly did not give me any hands on training or guidance and I mostly followed what the other reps did. We did virtual training but it was very vague, outdated and didn't go over in store procedures such as selling. Unfortunately he had to go on leave only a couple weeks after I started and we were left without a manager for a while.
Second manager was an acting manager with no management experience, he was just a rep from another location. From this guy I felt extremely discriminated. He acted very friendly and brotherly to my coworkers, joking around with them, showing them applicants' resumes and laughing while he acted stoic and cold to me. My doubts were confirmed when he met our new part timer– another brown guy– for the first time and greeted him with a fistbump and jokingly saying, “You been avoiding me man?” Any time I tried to ask a question about how to do something he would say, “Look it up on our retail website”, to which I would and it wouldn't show up because I won't even go into detail about how terrible, slow and uncooperative our software and resources were. I'd end up crying in the back on several occasions because he would coldly scorn me for messing up, such as not telling a customer they need to wear a mask as it's company policy (I didn't think to notice, inattentional blindness)
We hired two new guys in my time of working and they were both brown as well.
Anyway, in my ~6 months of working we had about 6 different managers and probably 2 months worth of time where we had no management at all so morale was generally terrible, reps would cut corners and duties were getting put off. I genuinely did try but it was insanely difficult when everyone had their own ways of doing things, not to mention the managers believed we were fine on our own. Most of the information definitely was on our resource websites but like I said it was not that easy to navigate and find, typically you'd have to search up a keyword and 90% of the time it did not show up the appropriate article even with the keyword in it. Keep in mind they hired me knowing I had no sales experience or any experience selling high value items and the fraud prevention guide was, like I said, vague and actually you could pass the training even with wrong answers.
What can I do? I feel like I've been set up for failiure. I feel humiliated that this happened because I had a strong work ethic and really believed I gave more of a shit about my job than the other reps. Not to mention the discrimination. I could care less about their shitty kindergarten techniques of recognizing employees but I worked the most hours, picked up the most shifts, did opening AND closing overtime shifts due to their terrible managing, and took on more responsibilities than the other reps (like doing routine inventory, being the inspection rep and doing some stupid sales pitch ambassador program) and yet I never ever got any sort of recognition not even on their stupid recognition/achievements website. They would pick some part timer rep who worked 2 days a week over me.
Is any of this justifiable grounds for a complaint?
TL;DR: Got fired on the spot for selling to fraudsters multiple times when I had no consistent training and no reliable management or coaching. They claimed it happened because I didn't follow policies but they have no evidence of that, only hearsay. Had shitty, distant managers whom I believed were discriminating me because I'm a woman. Worked with an entire team of all guys of the same ethnicity and heritage in the 6 months I worked. Never got any recognition for busting my ass off while the other guys got away with cutting corners and not putting in their work. Is there anything I can do?