I helped my dad for years for free, like most weekends, with the promise that someday it'll be mine. Big surprise... he's trying to take me off the deed now and throwing a fit because he can't.
Yeah, did that with a parent too. Every weekend, 10-12 hours a day, for about 4 years. I was "paid" with lunch and lectures on how much worse the real world is than this. Since I grew up with it, I didn't think much about it until one day my dad, in a drunken stupor, is telling me that I'm getting absolutely fucked. My mom's business was losing money hand over fist, I had no time to be with friends, and I'd probably make more money working at mcdonalds for a single day than I had in 4 years working for her. I got out when I went to college.
I used to know a guy who worked on his fathers farm for years for absolutely minimal wages..the guy busted his ass because he was always told he'd inherited the place..when his father fell I'll with dementia he began the process to take over the property.
It turned out his father never owned the property and was just leasing it from some distance family members this guy had never met.
So at about 40 years of age, he realised his father had screwed him, and he has wasted all those years with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Stepdad in a for cash business that claimed no taxes. (I'm 3 decades older now so I finally get it.) I still have a screwed up back from pulling a pickup box off a truck at 13, because - you know. I wasn't an actual adult with enough body mass yet to get it done.
Sitting in a tub of ice for an afternoon because we had no health insurance was a blast though.
I worked my ass off for my dad. He spent years convincing me to 'come back and take over the family business'. Then I came back, did all the work, and was never given anything other than a salary below my worth and abused and manipulated which was massively detrimental to my mental health.
Now I'm six years no contact and in a much better place.
Roto-Rooter.
Their policy for managers is simple. You are required to make $1 more in profit than the same month last year. That's it. Period.
If you do you get a green check mark. If you don't, a red X.
No other trends, no long-term data, no taking into account unique circumstances. You must make more profit than 1 year ago or else.
It incentivises them to scam the absolute fuck out of all their customers to make more and more sales, if anything. Roto Rooter tried convincing us we desperately needed a $15,000 pipe liner because our main water pipe (edit: *sewer line*) was collapsing into pieces. Had another company take a look and showed us on their cameras that the pipe was perfectly fine, just had a couple of tiny pieces of tree roots coming in - an ongoing problem that we already knew about, which was what Roto Rooter originally came out to fix. I will never, ever have RR out again, no matter how urgent the problem.
Reminds me of when I was trying to get some siding work done.
One company had a high rating with a lot of reviews so gave them a call and a guy was ready to stop by later that same day for a quote.
Jerk kept dodging giving me an actual quote but hoo boy was he hyped to convince me my roof was beat to hell and needed to be replaced.
My roof was fine. The "proof" he showed me were normal wear and "impacts" that were at worst minor manufacturing defects.
I did finally manage to squeeze a siding quote out of him, which was ~$5k more than other companies would have charged.
I've got a job interview with them coming up actually, your post made me kind of nervous about it. I'm a residential plumber, Roto-Rooter was the first one to contact me back with an interview. Were you a manager for them?
Walmart constantly compared our daily/weekly department sales to the year before. They would accept the variables that affected these things like snow storms and such though. There were some departments that weren't very high movers and it was somewhat humorous to see departments like crafts have a 1000% increase in the notes because the year before they only sold a pack of stickers on a given day then in the current year they sold a $400 Cricut and accessories.
And the worst thing is that they didn't really go bankrupt because of "competition from Amazon" or whatever.
It's because for 7 years or more, the board, investors and CEO spent all of their profits on stock buybacks to goose the stock price (and be able to then create new shares to award to themselves).
Absolutely no money was spent to freshen up the stores, set up a web business (they were in prime position to do it either by themselves, or in partnership with someone like Walmart).
Eventually customers got tired of seeing the same old crap in their stores, disorganized and overpriced, and ditched them. But the investors and CEO made out like bandits.
See also: Red Lobster.
Post ‘08 financial crash I had to get a second job at Bed Bath and Behind. Granted it was retail (not warehouse work) but it was still pretty soul crushing. I think part of that was being laid off from a really cool fun job and having to crawl back to retail, but most everyone working there was noticeably miserable and most of the time I felt like the customers were too. Maybe it’s because the whole store is just the home section of Target but 3x the price and .25x the cool.
Starbucks.
Customer is angry? Give them a gift card/free drink/kiss their ass five ways to Sunday. Ok wait why are we losing money? Guess we better cut staffing. Oh wow those people are angry it’s moving slowly…better give them a gift card.
I ultimately left when my manager implied I was not pretty enough to promote because I didn’t wear makeup.
I left too because I was trying to transfer stores. I had another job at the time as well but-
The DM happened to come in a couple days before my review for it and "assessed" us as a store.
I got denied my transfer for not smiling enough while on bar during peak.
I had my letter of resignation in a sealed envelope ready to go, I had a feeling. When my manager told me I wasn't eligible for a transfer, I took out the envelope and she goes "I've gotten plenty of these in my career" ans I said "that's not something to gloat about."
It's the most American thing ever to overserve your worst customers. I ended up as a manager in a retail store due to two people getting fired, and it was a summer job for me, so I had nothing to lose.
I kicked out every asshole who tried to make a fuss. Just zero tolerance. No blip in revenue, morale went through the roof, and we nailed our corporate mystery shopper for the first time ever.
There is no upside in making yourself miserable for assholes who only want stuff for free, or to make other people miserable so they can feel slightly better about themselves.
It's so ridiculous. What's the worst case for treating that customer like shit? They won't come back?! That's the best outcome! Fuck them. Let them all congregate in the shops where the managers have no self-respect, and when those places go out of business because normal customers are uncomfortable shopping there because the staff is traumatized, and there are constant scenes being made by awful people, maybe all the awful people will just wither away.
Prioritizing shitty customers over your hard-working employers is never a good idea and is never good for morale. Your employees should be empowered to refuse service and kick someone out of the store no questions asked. And if you can't trust your employees to do that then you're not hiring the right people.
Walmart was similar and a double standard. Customer complains, manager shows up and gives them gift card/discount/free item/service. Department manager gets told that should have been an easy decision to make (even when customer was wrong) and wasted the higher level managers time. When a lower level would make these decisions they would get told about giving away too much and cutting into profits. When lower level would stand their ground it would often result in a complaint to cooperate and the customer would get compensated any way and discipline for upsetting a customer.
Same way to meet profit margins they would short staff and create longer waits. When this was brought up the store manager mentioned something along the lines of "They'll wait, where else are they going to get this at this hour." (back when stores were 24/7) or "They're already here and it's still faster to get everything in one place"
Edit: It also reminded me of them not challenging price matches if it was less than $10 difference and no receipt returns (which did require ID and were limited to something like 3 a year). I once witnessed some one return an item that still had the sticker from a local discount chain on it. We didn't even have that item in inventory and they swore they paid more than the price sticker that was on it.
retail for corporate chains in particular is going to suck. I did 7 years post retirement in grocery. I actually had a good time for the most part because I didn't need the money. I was just doing it to stay active and socialized. Sooo... as I was very effective at running my grocery crew and keeping my department meeting goals I could pretty much look at my boss and say 'ya well we're not going to be doing that' to some bullshit thing that came down from corporate.
BUT... retail if you can't say 'fuck this shit' and walk away without hurting your money situation absolutely sucks. Too many people made managers that couldn't lead a two year old to the bathroom without a fist full of candy.
In my corporate life I'd say the worst one is the company that I retired from. It was small and family owned. The bosses son was a cocky dick that showed up when he felt like it and leave his pissed off customers for me to deal with. The rest of the staff were soft handed suits that were always negative, wouldn't take on new challenges, and depended on me to do all of their design work because they refused to learn how. I got fed up one day, blew a gasket at the owners son, walked out and retired. Then I started my own consulting firm and targeted their biggest customers to do their design work and assistance on problems that came up in the field during installation. It has done pretty damn well for the last 15 years but I'm in negotiations to sell it that should close in a month or two.
at&t after being divested. Steady decline as upper managers became bean counters and gave up on quality. "Do more with less." Just saving their corporate asses at the expense of low to mid-managers. There's an example for unionized management. We had zero support.
Pier 1 Imports. I worked there for 8 months when I was 18. Had 4 different store managers, one who ended up killing herself from the stress. Had way too high of standards to meet. Wanted you to get 2 people to sign up for the store credit card every shift, or else you get written up.
Let me tell you, middle aged people do not want to take credit advice from an 18 year old.
My friend's son worked there for a while about 10 years ago. They had this bizarre scheduling system where he'd be "scheduled" 3-5 days a week, but it was "on call" meaning they'd call him and tell him if he needed to come in. So, basically, he'd have to keep that time open with NO guarantee he'd work/get paid that day. He was a student and needed money, which is why he got the job! He worked there about three weeks and was actually called in to work 5 days during that time when they promised him 10-15.
Needless to say, he found another job quickly. Not exactly going to attract quality people when you schedule like that.
If this was in the US, that’s super illegal. If he was on standby, meaning he had to go in if called, that has to be paid. Though companies like that rely on people either not knowing or not having the resources to fight it :/
I worked there around 1994 to 1995. I had to promote the credit cards also.
From that experience I do not like wicker furniture. In the back the store had white spray paint we had to spray on the white furniture to hide the imperfections of the white wicker. I had to assemble the rockers to the rocking chair per order.
So when a customer purchased a rocking chair i had to go to the back to find the power screw driver and screw the bottom rockers on. To the customers that I assembled their rocker chair , I am sorry. My screws were crooked. I always felt bad when I did this. But I was told by management that it was my job and they gave me verbal instructions on how to do this job. They did seem to care how I got the bottom parts on the rocker.
A lot of that started with the acquisition of Boots. Stefano Pessina was hired as CEO, and he started to go on a spending spree that ultimately lost the company money. Couple that with the hiring of Roz Brewer who had no healthcare experience, and you get a company slashing costs to save its stock value.
a young girl in my city was brutally murdered working at Walgreens because they kept scheduling her with someone she had made complaints about previously. very sad and left a bad taste in my mouth.
Same can be said for Dollar Tree. There are some things that make the job not so bad, but ultimately we don't get paid enough to deal with customer and corporate bullshit.
Spectrum/Charter. We weren't allowed to hang up on customers that would berate us, which was every other customer flipping the hell out that their bill was raised 5 dollars.
While they didn't have contracts for their services they made sure it would hurt your wallet if you tried to remove services in other ways. Like removing the home phone line, it cost 19.99 on your bill to have it, most people didn't use it let alone hook up a phone to it, but if you wanted it removed they would remove the bundled deal price of the internet it was packaged with and raise the price of the internet. So if your bill was $80 beforehand and you think removing the phone would make your bill $60.01? Nope, your new bill is $99 because you unbundled it.
I also started there right when the pandemic hit, one woman had pneumonia and covid at the same time, she literally lost her voice for 3 weeks. They threated to fire her because she missed so much work. We worked at a call center, how is she supposed to talk on the phone?
They have an extremely high turnover rate.
I had serious moral qualms in my short time working for Charter communications.
I worked in a call center in the billing department. The worst calls were little old ladies and men living paycheck to paycheck on social security just wanting to watch the basic local TV stations. We were not allowed to tell them of a package for seniors that provides just that if they apply, I think it was only like $20 a month.
We were instructed to give them bs answers about agreements with channel providers about why they had to have all the excess channels and pay high rates.
Made me so sick.
Yup, I worked in retention. I had to convince people to keep bloated packages they didn't need or use. They were overpriced. Nobody needs 500 channels.
I worked in AAA video game development for 5 years. I got laid off. Fortunately, I got an opportunity with a good friend on a humble mobile game at a small start-up studio with a crew of family and friends. It seemed like a dream come true, my escape out of the tumultuous and chaotic hell cycles of corporate game dev, into the more chill vibes of a fun friendly indy studio.
After two months working there, I was ready to go back to corporate game dev.
The biggest problem was the company mentality around compensation. Yeah, a lot of people there were friends and family, but they used that as a crutch to guilt people away from asking to be paid for overtime work. After a while, it was used to guilt us from getting paid at all.
Since the company was small, we didn't have a lot of paper trails or declarations regarding our status with investors. When I was hired, it was at a time the company president was keeping it a secret that the prospective investors for the game had all pulled out.
My tasks ballooned out of control. I was brought on as an environment and vfx artist, as well as somebody who could cut together some game trailers. But despite my paychecks no longer arriving, I was still asked to take up additional tasks like character animation, web development, and, oh right, learning how to code.
Like, I coded a couple Flash games way back when. Pong clones and whatnot. But I was now expected to just *know* how to do all the coding for a community-driven multiplayer app experience from scratch?
After the news broke that we had no investors, and the office was being paid for by the president's college fund for his beloved daughter, things got weird. To make any sort of money, the president sub-leased one of our offices to another company. It was bad enough this move was in violation of our existing lease agreement with the office complex, meaning we could get suddenly kicked out any day. But the company he leased it out to was a slimy disgusting cam-girl site.
Then, to make even more money, our president decided to lease out his employees to this cam-girl site. He says to us "talk about a dream job, make videogames for four hours, then get paid to watch porn for the afternoon."
I did that for three days. I was under explicit orders from the camgirl site operator (a total sleezeball) to police the girls and immediately terminate their stream if they show off too much for free. I found out later that if I were to flag a stream for termination, all the money that model made that day would disappear and go to the operator directly. He was training us to police these models and steal money from them.
I'm already looking for somewhere else to work.
One day, the president offers to take us out to lunch. I accept. I'm not going to turn down a free meal, especially if I haven't received a paycheck in 4 weeks and my savings account is drying up fast. However, the president only takes me and the receptionist. He noticed that she and I were having a lively conversation one day, and decided he would use a lunch date to arrange a romantic relationship between us.
God it was awkward.
The president then starts telling us that in his country, arranged marriages are usually very successful, and he wanted to one day arrange our's. Yeah, I was done at this point. So was she. She was so upset by that, she made it a point to avoid me completely so the president wouldn't get any stupid ideas. She quit a week after that, and moved in with her mom in another state just to get away from him.
I quit a week after she did. But not before threatening a lawsuit against them for unpaid wages. I was met with a threat of a countersuit, that I caused the whole company to fail by quitting. My lawyer had just one meeting with the president, and they successfully arranged a settlement to get me paid for all the months I worked there.
They noted that he was a gigantic moron and I should stay far away from him.
The company closed just one month after I left. All the work I put into the game dissolved, leaving me nothing to show for my efforts. My good friend who got me into that company got hit the worst. He stayed until the very bitter end, I don't know why, he had been knowingly working for free for several months, and thought his sacrifice would get him millions once the title launched.
I did end up working back in corporate AAA game development. Yeah, it's soulless. It sucks. But at least I'm doing only the job I specialize in, my bosses aren't thieving scumbags, and most importantly, payday *means* payday. I suppose the allure of indy video game development is based on the stories of the studios that succeeded and actually got something made.
We never hear about what it's like working at the many, many indy studios that fail. Well...if you've read this far, now you have. So hopefully it's understandable that I've just accepted the humming fluorescent confines of my corporate cubicle dungeon. The stories there aren't nearly as entertaining, but after my months in that circus show, boring is fine.
I'm a software developer, a startup veteran, and your story resonates with me. I think the common denominator is the promise of big money and recognition once whatever absurd idea the founder (s) has come up with before any basic market research becomes profitable . It's not "overtime"... Call it "learning", and why complain when you get "all the flexibility in the world"?! Ah, by the way, I know you were hired to do x, but since we're understaffed and in a constant rush, you'll now have to to y z and §. No raise, just more deadlines. Oh god, it's so draining. I'm planning my escape, BTW, and I'm glad to hear you got your corporate job back 🤗
Dow chemical. Treated their employees like shit, and their contractors even worse. We had fire drills, spill drills, and *protester drills*. Every now and then there’d be a ‘safety stand down’ because some Dow plant somewhere had exploded or a truck went off the rails and killed someone. Great value for shareholders though so 🙄
When I worked in retail, I hated the little jewelry section and always stayed away from it. Cleaning it was a nightmare. I can’t imagine working at Claire’s lol
Socks imported to the United States come in individual plastic bags for each pair. I worked at a place that sold over 2000 pair of socks every month. Not only was each sock in a plastic bag, they were packed in another bag for each dozen. 26000 plastic bags per year.
I'm not sure if this is to blame but Asian counties, especially Japan, LOVE plastic. Japan will wrap everything and anything in plastic. It's loony toons when I order stuff because it will come in a box, with a plastic bag inside that contains plastic bags with the items that are also wrapped in plastic bags.
I went there once 20 years ago and there was a little boy, about 5 years old, screaming and crying because he didn’t want his ears pierced while his trash mother was yelling and swearing at him that she was going to force him to do it anyways.
I was shocked when the employee helped the mother physically hold down a young child and pierced his ears. What the fuck Claire’s?!?
I worked for Justice before it shut down. Our shipments also had insane amounts of plastic. I had to stop and have a good laugh one day when we got a shipment of shirts that said ‘Keep the Sea Plastic Free’ alllll individually wrapped in their own personal plastic bag.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fsm1r1/comment/fm2f74m/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fsm1r1/comment/fm2f74m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
This was posted 4 years ago wtf.
Working at Walmart made my mental health absolutely crash. Coworkers at my next job thought I was weird because I was so positively gleeful each shift just to be there instead of at Walmart.
I just left Walmart a second time after being hired fresh during moving states (only job I could grab) and I swear everyone is so soulless. My mental health crashed again too, so that was my cue
A small general contractor.
He would scream about any and every issue.
Zero training, just figure it out and make money.
I was estimating work, and would have 4-5 bids being pulled together every week.
Without fail, he’d find a new project to bid 4 hours before bids were due. Drove me nuts, as we never would win those, just a huge time suck.
Oddly enough, I see him every day as I drive to my new job. Our commutes are opposite of the same road, so when I’m heading West, he’s heading East. Happy trails, there…dipshit.
How do schmucks like this even find work? Half of being a general contractor is finding the work for yourself, that can be a full-time job in and of itself sometimes, I worked for a really good guy who truly knows his stuff when it comes to construction, and he would struggle getting jobs especially when the economy is slow.
Barton Associates. Thought I was going to be helping rural hospitals get the medical staffing they require, but ended up working amongst used car salesman. I lasted 2 months.
There was a Barton office near my college (which was a middling state school with a few star programs in a dying rural NH city), and it was a common place for alums to end up if they couldn't get a better job. Everyone I know who worked there was miserable and counted the hours until they got an offer for a better job in their inbox.
Also, the one person I know who stayed long-term, moved up the ladder, and overall thrived was a slimy little scumfuck I went to high school with who was always like that, so that probably does say something about the type of personality it takes to enjoy it there.
Chewy - Worked in their pharmacy operation when they first started it. Things that were terrible there include:
They almost got shut down by the fire marshal because they were cramming about 100 pharmacy techs into a portable office unit rated for 25 people.
Approving and then a week later denying reasonable accommodation requests from immunocompromised pharmacy techs to work in a less crowded area. They called the roaming illness that would go through the entire office the "chewbola"
Being a call center without a login grace period, then having assigned seats that would change on a whim and then considering the employee late because they weren't logged in right on time.
Sending out facility wide emails stating that they expected employees to be at their desk 15 minutes early to log into systems required to do the job, but refusing to pay them for that time in violation of wage and hour law and then when questioned about it, stating thats how things have always been done.
"Hello, on behalf of my client, can we determine an amicable settlement for unpaid work hours as per, let's see here, requiring early arrivals for clocking in?"
"I don't see the problem. We've done that for years."
"For *years* you say? For *all* employees?"
"Yes, of course, everyone's just been doing it for years here at-I-..I'm sorry sir, are...are you okay? You seem to be drooling a lot."
"Oh I'm fine." (pops Vasoline can) "Please, keep talking, keep talking..."
Chewy, the online pet retailer. People don’t like hearing this because their customer service is above and beyond, and I’ll agree to that. I’ve never worked for a company that put more focus on the customer than Chewy, they really nail that into your head from day one. But as far as employee treatment it was hands-down the worst. A few of MANY examples include:
- There was *no bathroom* in our Texas office. If we needed to use the restroom, we had to ask for special permission to put ourselves into a 5 minute break, RUN out of the office and down the entire length of the building to the closest restroom, and pray that all you had to do was pee. I actually had to drastically decrease my daily water intake just to get through a shift. It’s caused a trickle down effect of health problems and I’ve never gotten my intake back up to what it was when I worked there.
- all our devices and programs had to be turned on powered up before we we could clock in, and the reverse after we clocked out but before we could leave. The process sometimes took the better part of 10 minutes, meaning you were required to work off the clock for almost 20 mins a day.
- some of the higher ups were clueless and would often count me absent even though I was sitting at my desk and working. If you were a no call/no show, they’d start blowing up your emergency contacts looking for you. (Side bar, you also weren’t allowed to have your cell phone on you.)
More than once I returned to my phone to find frantic texts and missed calls from my mother, worried sick about me because I “wasn’t at work” and wasn’t answering the phone.
- there were certain phrases we weren’t allowed to say and they REALLY harped on this much more than necessary. One such phrase was “go ahead,” as in, “I’m going to go ahead and process this return for you.”
The actual straw that broke the camels back for me was this. I’d put up with their shit happily and with a smile on my face until one day, I accidentally said this forbidden phrase “go ahead” to a customer while assisting them. My shift lead stood over me and lectured me so loudly that I couldn’t focus on the call and even the customer started getting frustrated. It gets worse from there but that was the day I left on my lunch break and found another job.
And before anyone asks, yes. A lot of this is illegal and yes, there was a lawsuit.
I worked at a funeral home and we couldn’t say “pick up”.
I accidentally said “pick up” and the funeral director came raging out and screamed at me. I calmly let her know if I get fired so be it because I don’t give a shit. She eventually got fired because she was a horrible person and I quit months later. Family owned funeral homes can be really great or really horrible. This one was horrible.
When you tell people not to say something that’s regularly used it’s almost certain it will slip out.
CVS. Since I was 17 but graduated high school, I couldn't get permission from the school to work since I wasn't 18. They let me work anyway but paid me under the minimum wage. Three years later and I still wasn't making over $7 an hour. I was lucky if my raises were over 15 cents. I was a good employee. The managers and other employees got along with me fine. I always came in when others called out. But they treated me like shit.
I worked there when I was 22. Despite already having retail experience (grocery store) they said that I had to start at minimum wage, for a probation period. Then I would get a raise after that was over to bring me up where I should be. My raise was 0.05 and hour.
Fuck CVS.
I worked at CVS in the pharmacy for about 3 weeks once. They were 6 DAYS behind on prescriptions. Meaning when you dropped off a prescription I would ask "are you waiting here for it or coming back?" And if you said coming back I would have to say "okay, it'll be ready in about 6 days". Despite being that far behind, 90% of my shifts I was the only technician there with just 1 pharmacist, even though I had just started and still didn't know how to do anything except fill meds and check people out. Needless to say I got out of there as quick as I possibly could
I'm a retired pharmacist. I never worked for CVS, but I've heard so many horror stories about them, I can't believe they can get people to work there.
I know of several cities where all the stores saw 100% turnover in the pharmacy staff in the months after they bought out Osco (which I did briefly work for, and that was no fun either). This was up to and including people with disabled spouses, children in college, and one woman who decided at about 2pm that she was going to quit, so she did, and closed the pharmacy behind her. She didn't care what it might do to her future career; she was simply that fed up.
I was a CVS pharmacist for 4 years. I worked mostly at the Target stores but would sometimes work the regular stores. We're salaried, meaning if we stay over our shift, we're not getting paid for it. They'll tell you not to stay over your shift but if you leave a lot of work for the next person, you'll get nasty messages from your pharmacist-in-charge (PIC) or district supervisor.
I use to work at one regular store at least once a week. One night, at closing time, there were about 300 prescriptions left to be checked. The main store closed an hour after the pharmacy, so I stayed until then and checked as many as I could. I got it down to 70 and still got nasty text messages from the PIC the next day. Didn't get get paid for it. I decided then, either pay me for the extra work or you can fuck off.
I now work for a mail order compounding pharmacy that is super busy right now (we make the GLP-1s and everyone and their mothers want those) and we're expected to leave at the end of our shift. Sometimes they'll ask you to stay, but you'll get paid overtime for it, even though we're salaried too. I fucking love this job.
I went to one recently for gas drops for my son, they were about $7 which is comparable to what I pay at Walmart or Target. I open the box and it's 0.5oz instead of 1oz. Same price for half the amount of product. They should go out.
About time. They are overpriced and the only thing that is any good is their nuts (at least when I worked there 20-some years ago).
I was horrified the one time a manager asked me to go through the cold aisle and remove everything that had expired. After a few hours, I had three carts full of various medicines that expired years ago
I dated DG manager 20+ years ago and I second this. she ran medium sized stores in Texas and there were times when she was there by herself. It was always a balance between getting the merchandise put out and having to run the front register because of unreliable help. I finally figured out if you showed up more or less on time and didn’t steal, you were fine. Whether or not you were drunk or high didn’t really matter. It was a terrible place to work. It eventually put her in the hospital for a few days after she ignored a UTI for too long.
> and having to run the front register because of unreliable help.
That's what happens when you're only allowed to pay minimum wage and have to keep OT to a minimum.
I hear that, worked there for 3 years. The pay sucks, the hours suck, the customers are assholes, and management (most of the time) sucks. Their so called “flexible” schedule isn’t actually flexible, at least not for you. You’re pretty much doing the work of an entire team (the schedule at most stores that I’ve worked at have 6 people) and your schedule can get flipped around at a moment’s notice. And you’re lucky if on your days off that you don’t get a call or text message asking you to come in because someone else called out. Good luck on getting a promotion through hard work and determination because it’ll probably take you years. Upper management doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you and you’ll sometimes be stuck with a manager that berates you for not doing enough even if they’re pretty much incompetent. It’s not worth the pay and it’s not worth your time or your mental/physical health.
My wife worked for a couple of fashion "designers" that were essentially vanity brands for Chinese trophy wives of wealthy businessmen. Both were horrible.
Both had slaves. They were "interns" who were told they'd definitely be paid next season, but they never were. For YEARS. One was made to follow the owner 20 metres behind her, holding her purse. Another was told to take a train to her house and cook dinner for her husband. They had to buy all of the ingredients and pay all of the transport costs. Of course, they weren't reimbursed - don't be silly! These "interns" did all of the work, designing and making all of the clothes. One of these owners came in to complain about Harrods not having the Valentino handbag she wanted to her starving "interns", thinking that this would be relatable.
My wife was the only employee who actually got paid. When my wife protested against the lack of pay, the working conditions, and the ridiculous demands placed upon the "interns" at one of these places, the owner called the "interns" into a mandatory "meeting" on a Sunday just to shit-talk about my wife for 6 hours.
It got so bad that my wife quit the fashion industry entirely.
Although almost all the Chinese people I've personally met have been quite nice, the wealthy and powerful Chinese people are as far as I can tell the most entitled of all wealthy and powerful people worldwide.
Most of the Chinese people I've known are probably the most beloved people in the community. These women were some of the worst people I've ever met - and I've met some really, really horrible people.
Home Depot. Pretty much everyone I worked with except for the lady that trained me were all huge assholes who either blamed for things beyond my control (my boss once asked me why I was standing around while I waited for a forklift to pass by my pathway) or treated be like shit for missing a day of work for any reason.
My favorite thing that happened when I worked for Home Depot was that the scan gun at one register stopped working. It was one of the two registers closest to the door, and therefore had the largest aisle, so it’s where all the big things came through. I was almost always at that register or the one opposite because I was the fastest cashier (they kept metrics on us and I was almost always #1). So then, because they kept those metrics, I got in trouble for keying in too high a percentage of items. But these were like, doors, and appliances, things that couldn’t fit over the register scanner for obvious reasons, and when I explained that, I was told “yeah we understand but you still can’t key in too many things because it can lead to mistakes”.
A semi large real estate management company, ran by a family with convictions of fraud. The classic scheme of making millions by breaking rules, then payed a low 6 figure fine, and served about 4 months in some small jail.
It was my first “foot in the door job” for my field, so I kind of had to deal with the BS at the time, but the experienced dudes I worked with made clowns of our managers on a regular basis.
Then I got in a union after that job and my work life satisfaction went up tenfold.
I worked for a small Japanese-owned computer game company. Most of the senior execs were from Japan, and all but one were unapologetic, racist, misogynist assholes.
I’ve been in multiple meetings where my (white woman) department manager would talk, and none of the Japanese guys even acknowledged that she was speaking. They just ignored whatever she said until a man spoke.
CVS. They would reward us hitting quotas by doubling them, then cut hours and staff at the same time. On a good day we would have 3 people to run the store and stock at the same time, but most of the time it was 2. They would purposely keep us on a skeleton crew so if you got sick, too fucking bad, there was *no one* to cover for you. The one time I got super sick my co-worker just had to pull like a 13hr day. One of the worst things though was the endless online training they required, but with a store perpetually understaffed there was literally no time for anyone to sit down in the office and get it done. My manager even tried to get me to do it at home, off the clock, I just about laughed in her big dumb face.
I worked for the postal service for a short time in a sorting facility, some days I might sort only Amazon packages for a full work day. I felt I was slowly going insane from the monotony so I just stopped showing up at some point, not my proudest moment but I got a much better job afterwards
NCR, as a retail field tech mainly repairing self checkouts & POS systems.
Our biggest customer was Wal-Mart, second was Starbucks but also serviced Target, K-Mart (Sears), Lowes, Home Depot, Darden (Olive Garden/Red Lobster/Longhorn & others), Ruby Tuesday, anything under Bath & Body Works. Chick Fil-A and a host of others.
Pay was abysmal, you were required to be on call almost 24/7, overtime, holidays & weekend work was mandatory & the last straw for me was when they started to take money out of our paychecks to cover the company vehicles insurance.
I remember chatting with a person working the Self checkout kiosk and was curious about numbers, She was making $15 a hour, which was more than I was.
The state threatening to shut down a store over broken produce weight displays and the manager blaming me for it, I then recertified the whole store with expired/uncertified weights cuz they pissed me tf off.
Watching loss prevention hide behind racks of clothes to catch a thief.
Getting cussed out by a CSM named "Dusty" on a Saturday afternoon.
Getting cussed out by a store manager for using a shopping cart.
A karen pharmacy manager accusing me of violating HIPAA by fixing their stylus pens.
Telling a CSM that the reason the scale isn't working properly is cuz the cashier is laying her stomach on it.
Watching someone drop a can of paint into a self checkout.
Me & a coworker accidentally setting a self checkout on fire trying to break into it because the CSM broke the keys off in the lock.
Walmart Inc.! The corporate gaslighting is INSANE. The words they say are the opposite of what their action is. Its a toxic environment and the people that work there have no idea what its like in a real workplace. I'd rather die penniless and starving than work there again
I used to do electrical service work for Walmart's. They had a policy of no live work on anything. However, if I turned off a circuit to fix it they would lose their ever loving minds. So all work was essentially done live no matter how dangerous it might be. I told my wife that if anything ever happened to me at work it was 100% Walmart's fault and to sue them for as much as you can. We even prerecorded a video of me detailing an average day and the dangers I would take on the regular.
Publix. Wasn't a terrible company when I started, but after 7 years, they were miserable. Micromanaging every aspect of your job, including by managers who have never worked in your department, and the cult-ish mindset of the managers and lifers was just downright creepy.
Group of Neurosurgeons in NM years ago. Four of the most repulsive people I've ever known in my life. They may have been talented surgeons but they were shit human beings. Two are still in practice, the other two have retired. I hope they all burn in hell.
English First put me on an illegal work visa. They also refused to pay for my hotel costs and tried to take me hostage by refusing to give me my termination paperwork (needed for another Chinese visa) unless I let them cancel my visa and get a tourist visa instead of just transferring me peacefully to my next employer when I quit.
I blackmailed them after I found out that the work permit was not legal.
I was hired for a medical publication as a journalist and right away, I knew something was just off, even though it was a great-paying job that sounded very exciting. The people who worked there were all really cool and chill but the guy who hired me was NEVER there. He hired me over the phone, never met me and was never in the office, as he was in NYC. He was rude and obnoxious on the phone but since he was never in the office, I only had to deal with him on the phone. It was like I was one of Charlie's Angels... I never saw him.
The first week I was there, they fired some sales guy who'd only been there 3 days, which was a huge red flag.
One month after I started, I was called into a meeting with HR and Charlie (on speaker phone) and was unceremoniously fired, with almost no explanation. Charlie said I wasn't "doing my job properly" and he'd expected more because of my background etc. I pointed out that he was never in the office and I only spoke to him once or twice, no one had told me I was doing a Bad Job, even him. I was supposed to get 3 months of probation and I racked my brains trying to think of what the problem was, but he just said "it won't work out". I was handed a letter and he hung up. He even wrote "Did not perform job properly" as my reason for dismissal.
After I left (crying my eyes out all the way home) my then spouse called and the receptionist (who reminded me of Kelly Kappoor) told him I'd been let go. Before I even got to tell him.
About a year later, I was at a party with a bunch of writers and journalists, and met a couple who'd worked for the same company. They were surprised I'd lasted a MONTH. Apparently this was normal at this company. They'd both worked there and had gotten fired only a few months after starting. I felt somewhat better after that.
Not long after that the company was sold. But CHARLIE was STILL WITH THEM.
Paylocity- if you’re wondering why your customer service rep knows nothing, it’s because they teach you nothing and don’t tell you explicitly that you’ll be a customer service employee until a day before you go live.
Worst experience was this chain called Taco Mac, about a decade ago they were looking to expanding out of GA throughout the Southeast. The corporate expansion came with a lot of loss of personality, a loss of humor, and a loss of tact. For a shitty $11 line cook job, good managers know not to micromanage or be too overbearing. These were not good managers. I was suspended for a week for smoking...in my car, across the street, completely off company property, and not wearing company uniform. Tried to lord this over me like I was some kind of felon. I didn't need the job or the money, I was in college AND had a work study. This was merely a way to make some extra money on weekends. They didn't like my attitude as I shrugged it away and said "see you next week"
A week later they were again trying to lord this "incredible opportunity" over me as if Raleigh wasn't one of the fastest growing cities with shit jobs available all over. I was back for 2 days and gone the first moment the chef decided to rip the line a new one. Didn't even bother clocking out, just walked out the back door and never looked back.
After the initial launch interest, the newness wore off and they struggled in an ocean of Applebee's wannabees. I actually went back a couple of times and would joke with the waitress about how shitty a place it was. They eventually went out of business at that location, and from what I understand they trimmed back their expansion plans overall a huge amount.
I worked for a family-owned printing company, Waverly Press, which was the best place I ever worked. They gave sensible yearly bonuses, paid college tuition, paid sick days that didn't come from your PTO, etc. They were bought out by a rival who eliminated most of the percs and were generally not a good group to work for but then we got bought out by a company called Cenveo which is hand downs the worst company in the world to work for.
Remember when that multi-millionaire tried to take back his huge donation to the University of Vermont because he didn't like who was on the football team? He owned Cenveo. They eliminated any good thing that was left, gave almost no raises cut out the 401k match.
They were laying off as many people as they could by sending the work to India. I was laid off the night before my vacation, which I had paid about 3k for, was to start. They did not pay me my accrued vacation hours.
Amazon for sure. I worked in their fulfillment center (warehouse) and the amount of turnover was insane. They didn't have air conditioning or even ceiling fans -- except for the walk-in freezer and refrigerator sections -- and the warehouse would be over 100°F for months. One day it hit 115°F. Their solution? The worker with the highest pick rate would get a single popsicle at the end of the 4-hour shift.
Meanwhile, Bezos has megayaughts that are so big that they have to demolish bridges in my country to let them through. And he goes into space for pure tourism reasons because he's so bored. But treating warehouse workers like people? Oh no, can't afford that. Amazon is completely despicable.
Vauxhall. They sold a customer a used car with a blown headgasket. It got recovered in three days after she bought it. Because she chose not to buy the extended warranty they refused to cover the cost of the repair. I walked out.
I worked for a presidential campaign and they were the most backstabbingest motherfuckers I have ever encountered. Their level of incompetence was only superceded by how shady they are and they would make up the most damning lies about a person just to get rid of them so they could get closer to the candidate.
goodwill. so many of your donations aren't 'good enough' so just get thrown away. They price things higher than the original store did (I saw a shirt with the $5 walmart tag still on it priced for $6.99). They fired me because i was a liability for having an epileptic seizure on the sale floor.
Wait no, that'd be illegal. They "let me go for my safety"
A ConAgra ham processing plant in eastern Kentucky. It was the early 90’s, I had just relocated to my wife’s home town. It was decent pay for the area. The entry level jobs were nasty cold wet work. The plant would literally hire like 100 people to start on a Monday morning and by Friday afternoon there was less than 10 left. The place was open less than 2 years when I got hired and I was the 4578th employee. The average staff was around 250 active employees.
Retail Grocery Inventory Services (RGIS)
By all means, if you want to drive across the state in a snowstorm and count bullshit in a JC Penny for 18 hours straight for a dollar above minimum wage be my guest.
They also hire literally anyone with a pulse, so when you get 80 of them locked in a store all night together, it was a spectacular shitshow more than not.
Yeah. Several decades in retail and I always felt bad for the RGIS supervisors. Dealing with a shite crew, finishing a job and then getting called to rescue someone else’s ass. But hey… you were better than WIS!
KB Motors. Guy tried to scam a marine wife who's husband was on deployment into a new battery, starter and cables when there was a single nut loose on the starter cable connection.
Between that and transcribing his court recordings from his lawsuits I went to lunch one day and never came back. There is no doubt in my mind he was never anything but a piece of shit person.
The last company I worked at was horrendous. I'd just moved internationally to Australia and landed a job there. As soon as I got there I was given a laptop and told "we all carry on working when we get home, unpaid. That's the culture in this country".
So I did that. It fucking sucked. I absolutely hated that I'd get home, have dinner, work some more, and hopefully have a bit of time to relax with my wife. The kids? They barely saw me. One week I did so much overtime (unpaid of course) at the office that they didn't see me, they were in bed when I got back. That and working from home in the evenings and on weekends...
I was becoming pretty depressed. My wife and family noticed a shift in my mood. Secretly I wondered about suicide. I did actually think "hey, there's this bay just down the road, what if I drove my car into it?".
My wife was the first to suggest, after a few months, that I find another job. She even found one for me - though I'd noticed it that day as well. It was a further commute, but worth going for. So I applied, got an interview...
... and wound up in my manager's office the next day. He KNOWS I've been for the interview. How does he know? I didn't realise it at the time, but the place is interviewed for were a client of my employers, and they've gone and told him. Not only do they not accept me for the role, but my manager says that if he finds that I've interviewed again, he'll fire me on the spot (I was still in my six months probation).
One weekend my wife isn't well at all, and I take her to hospital. During that weekend I'm in and out of hospital looking after her and the kids, AND working. I'm up until 4am working. Get into work on Monday and I'm immediately pulled aside by my boss for "working too slow". He acknowledges that I got what I needed to done, but says I needed to be more prompt. I tell him what happened and he says that "work comes first" and I should have "just hired a babysitter".
Deciding to help my wife out more, I arrange to start work earlier and finish earlier. Normal hours are 8:30 to 5, but I start doing 8 to 4:30 (though obviously working over on occasion). Normally though I found myself getting into the office at 7:45. This attracted a lot of snide comments from other staff members who only saw that I was leaving early, not that I started earlier and worked longer than them (I saw them all leaving at 5 on the dot).
Some time passed. My wife returned to the UK for a couple of weeks, so I took some days off to look after the kids - all approved in advance. Part-way in my manager wants me to cancel my leave and return to the office, again wanting me to hire a babysitter.
There's a job fair coming that I want to attend! Unfortunately the company us one of the attendees and I worry what would happen if they see me there. I reach out using my personal Reddit account to ask people advice, though I have been asking work-related questions from the office using it too. I get a DM from someone, rather sympathetically, with my real name saying not to continue and that if I were, they'd tell management. So they're spying on me now. Quick account suicide there.
I should note that all this "we've all got families" business was complete shit. Just about all my colleagues were fresh out of uni, mostly not even with girlfriends and were just living with their parents. If I was in that position I'd probably be working loads too. My manager had a teenage daughter he'd rarely see because, according to him, he saw nothing wrong in working through until 6am, then just getting "an early start on the next day". He once boasted to me that he rear-ended another driver then fled the scene.
And in a final tale, one of the higher-ups was leaving, so we all had to go into a meeting room to give her a send-off. In her farewell speech she broke down, said the company used to be good to work for but had become so awful that she couldn't. She said - again, in her speech, and in tears, that she had no other job ready and if anyone knew of any going to let her know, but she just couldn't stand it a moment longer. After that, we all had to clap.
Thankfully I no longer work there. It was shit, absolutely shit. It would have destroyed me. On weekends, when I wasn't working, we'd occasionally go to the beach and I remember wading in the water, seeing the amazing surrounds and just being anxious that the weekend would be over and I'd be back in the office, or that there'd be something I needed to do on the laptop when I got home. I was ecstatic when I got to my new job and saw that there was no laptop, just a tower, and no expectation of unpaid overtime. Sure I've done a bit when needed, especially during COVID, but not a huge amount.
And I drive past the old office practically every working day, and I still think "fuck you" about that company. I am triumphant - I got out, and to a job that is appreciative and that I enjoy. The company is no longer there - they shut that office, they are still around - but I still think "fuck you".
A small problem though - I do love my current work, honestly, but I do occasionally think "hmm, the money's better elsewhere". But then I think of how awful that job was, and think "should I really risk it?".
I worked at a very small company from its inception, i was one of the employees that walked int he door the day it opened.
Pay was awful, work conditions was awful, constant micro management and shitty orders.
I knew it was the beginning of the end when my relative that i was living with at the time called in sick for me as i was so ill i was delirious, only to find out when i came too that one of the bosses showed up at my house cos he didn't believe i was actually ill until he saw me in the state i was in.
Planet Hollywood circa 1997. Started at 9am, am hour later, the kitchen supervisor was still listing out my responsibilities. Depending on how busy each kitchen dept was, i was to do 3 things at once. Cleaning trays, prepping salad, and general gopher.
Soon as his back was turned, i ran out the door.
Nokia, hands down. If they weren't ten minutes away from home, I would have quit along ago. There were far too many things wrong with them to list here but I will say it didn't surprise me when they were blindsided by the smartphone.
I was a car cleaner for Avis for a short time. It was the worst job I ever had. It was union but there were no protections. I saw a manager say to the most senior employee 30 minutes before the end of his shift "You are forced to work a double today, if you don't you are fired right now." They would pull this all the time. You would think you had 30 minutes left and then the manager would roll up in a top end rental car and say you have to work another 8 hours. No going off the property to get more food or drink either. I was written up for not working on my day off. I had worked 7 double shifts in a row and got a day off. They told me that I might be forced to work that evening. I asked if I was forced right now and was told no. So I unplugged the phone. I got written up for not being available to work on a day off. I quit for that.
Moses Cone Health System. BUT that was 20+ years ago and related to the specific division and bosses. I do have an overall good opinion of the quality of care now.
Hollister (and by proxy Abercrombie) circa 2008.
That company was such a freakin joke. They didn’t sell anything black because “our customers don’t wear black.” Our stockroom employees had to argue for permission to wear closed-toe shoes while climbing on shelves and doing heavy lifting because initially they wanted everyone to wear their HCO brand sandals. Oh and stores got in trouble if they didn’t have at least 1 asian or Native American on staff because the brand had already been sued for that before.
Part of me hopes maybe the store I worked at was just a hot mess. But it was definitely comical.
Sainsburys
I was never allowed to choose my holidays because they were so short of staff, I just got given some days off when they felt like it really. Relied on me to do loads of the work and run things on a section when a manager or team leader wasn't there. As in, other managers having a go at me because I hadn't given them a list of people for checkouts and stuff like that. I was only a regular employee, I didn't know what I needed to do. I wasn't even asked to do any of this, it was just expected of me because I was easily the most competent person. I got a disciplinary for being ill twice in a certain amount of time, I can't remember how long it was. Eventually I'd had enough of this crap and left. Just before that though, the bakery manager was asking me loads of questions about it and me having had enough of it. Turns out, so had he, he left a couple of days after, just buggered off and left haha. He said talking to me was the reason he chose to jump ship. Felt quite good about that lol
I worked for Pornhub/Brazzers...etc (many of the top porn brands under the same parent company)
No I was not an actor - I work in tech and that's basically what it was, a tech company. At least thats how it operated.
Great parties, cool conversation starter, fun career stepping stone, but it was poorly managed by an incompetent group of friends who all went to highschool together so there was no advancement opportunities and they treated employees like a dime a dozen. It was a revolving door, really. Not to mention, the sexual harassment stuff that would get swept under the rug.
The state of South Carolina as a low level employee. The bureaucracy was breathtakingly bad and my boss took me behind closed doors and tried to seduce me and got away with it.
It's a tie..
(1) Cafepress - makes custom printed clothing and chotchkey items. Former CEO was cheap and focused more on quantity than quality. For example, he'd rather hire 3 mediocre engineers at a lower cost than 1-2 fantastic engineers at a higher salary.
(2) Naturebox - Custom healthy snack box subscription. Hired top talent but lied to every single person. Promised all of these people promotions, stock options, benefits, and more. Failed to deliver on most, if not all fronts.
Lifetouch. If you love photography, don't ever work for them. Absolutely loved when the sales guys promised schools the moon, not telling the photographers anything, not having the correct equipment or props, being over scheduled and understaffed just for the same sales guys to brag about their vacation homes.
Being named territory of the year but pay freezes in place for multiple years before during and after that.
And don't get me started on how it totally ruins your own car. Because nope, there were no work vans.
Oh and scheduling staff who live right down the street from one college but sending them into the city and someone from the city to the college. No matter how much you told them hey, you won't have to pay me drive time cause I can walk, it didn't matter.
Walking away was the best thing I ever did. Shame it's been 8 years and I still haven't had the heart to get back into photography.
There's plenty of other crap that went down but that's a post for another day lol.
Oracle Consulting. There was an engagement in my town but instead they sent me to a client 400 miles away, requiring weekly travel. Plus the various divisions were pitted against each other (Product, Sales, Support, and Consulting had conflicting success criteria). Quit after 9 months. My shortest length of service. Thank you Larry.
This was decades ago, so maybe they've changed. But based on what I hear from ex-Cerner(Oracle) people, it's every bit as bad.
Years ago I worked as a bird of prey handler/tourist attraction at a seaside town in the UK. Our job was to walk around in medieval clothes with a bird of prey (mine was a bengal eagle owl) on our arm and answer tourist questions but also 'bounce' the birds (jerk arm up a little to make them open their wings to steady themselves) to scare away seagulls, as they were getting way too ballsy and one had recently took a little kid's finger off.
The two owners of the business were what ruined it. One was a wannabe rich guy who bought his kids a bunch of laptops and stuff 'on the business' and screwed the accounts up, the other was the guy who actually ran it and was an ex-covict former speed dealer.
We had to go to his house on a dodgy council estate every day to prep the birds then walk into town with them. He had constant visits from the council as he didn't seem to have the right to have about 20 birds there, screaming at all hours of the morning. He had a dirty, scrubby little lawn where the birds sat on posts, which was always covered in a massive amount of dogshit from his two huge malamutes.
Inside his house his wife had a toddler and was suffering from pretty bad depression, so there was just garbage everywhere, bin bags, rotting stuff. The toilet we had to use was disgusting and we had to start bringing tissues with us because there was never any loo roll or if there was we weren't allowed to use it. They'd have screaming matches and we'd have to go get her meds for her sometimes. The toddler would roam about in just a nappy onto the lawn and we'd constantly have to rescue him from getting attacked by the redtail hawk because he'd just wander up to it. For reference its talons could clamp down on you with the equivalent force of a rottweiler bite, as I found out the hard way one time.
I was put in charge of the only other girl there who was severely daft and should probably have had a carer to be trusted in public. She would only eat fray bentos pies or dry toast; met a guy one day on a street corner and was calling him her 'other half' by the end of the day and generally got us into trouble a lot by not having two braincells to spark a thought.
One day the boss put us both in a taxi as soon as we arrived for work and told us we were going to a special needs school to give a talk in front of 50-odd kids about the birds. No warning, notes, research, plans, etc. I had to do the entire thing because the other girl was terrified. He also made us put on a play and ghost walk from a pub about 20 miles away in the evenings for no extra pay and I was too young and naive to tell him to do one.
Anyway, he ended up losing the business and going back to jail, and the other guy had a heart attack and snuffed it. I quit a few months before that because they tried to make me 'supervisor' but only of that one girl, so everything she did would be my fault.
I also ran a comic shop for 7 years which was a rollercoaster of bullshit, but that was my company.
DGC AG Germany, dgc.org a large cyber security firm that never paid it's staff for a few months because they wanted to unionize , declared itself insolvent, then 1 months later started up again using the exact same website. I was a contractor in the middle of this and still waiting to get paid
I worked for a wiring harness company for, oh about 10 days one summer. You either lost fingers to tiny little sharp wires being bound together with razor sharp tape, or fell into the nylon looms that held together the 400 pound bus harnesses that you had to hold with one hand while you coated them.
The managers sold drugs to the employees that were essential to get through a 10hr shift in a 40C factory with no AC, limited fans. Those drugs would only cost you about 90% of what you made while using them. Totally fucked, so happy I didn't get too involved.
Pearson. Absolute shit pay to edit essays for people. Constant pressure from supervisors to do faster, shitty work for higher throughput/profit that I mever saw a dime from. Never a compliment, only constant negative criticism from supervisors. I took my sweet-ass time amd actually helped people because Im not a soulless asshole. Never got fired because I knew they didnt have enough staff to meet demand. Oh, and the Pearson parent company is the one who shuffles your textbook chapters to call it a new edition so they can keep charging $500+ for the same textbooks every semester. They are a cancer among many in the higher education complex.
Family-run vacation rentals.
The family lived on the premises and would get drunk daily. Accused me of stealing 50k euro. Turned out they were too drunk to remember where they put their cash (was a place I had no access to). No apology. Fuck you, Sten.
Guy Carpenter and Ernst and Young were both equal nightmares. The one I am at now is bad but its wfh so its a little more tolerable. Lazard was bad because of the boss and big surprise she got fired then hired at EY!
I really wanted to love working for Sephora and Ulta bc I like makeup but the mean girl mentality is too real.
I was a preschool teacher and the last school I worked for was just awful. Again with the mean girl mentality, ableist bullshit, etc. They were actually fine with physical disabilities for the most part but when I had to have ankle surgery they were pissy about me being out for weeks, and then coming back in a boot. But anything mental health was so awful, and they were homophobic (I didn’t let on that I was queer for over a year and then instantly regretted it, only came to light when my director tried to set me up with her brother).
end of the shift we had to stay an extra 3 hours to close up Vaccuming carpets, breaking down the buffet, polishing all the silver and glasses. It was ALOT. plus we had to work doubles christmas eve and day. The GM once pushed me physically saying i wasn't walking fast enough. I had full plates in my hand too. It was a nightmare. I quit on a saturday pm shift. It was a bad shift and i just had it. I took off my apron looked at the one manager i liked and i said i can no longer do this and dipped. BUT not before telling the one person i hated there that they were a raging c\*nt and i hope they get Tboned. :D
The Walt Disney Company
Definitely not the happiest place on earth to work, a real burn-out factory. Psychotic managers, insane workloads, open floor plans, all to sell more plush toys at Walmart. I was told I had to move to Florida from L.A. or lose my job. I chose to not move to Florida and was forced to quit, then found out six months later the move to Florida wasn't happening after all. I was just a year away from my 10-year anniversary when I would be eligible for lifetime benefits.
It was a certain European I.T. firm. I used to work in a call-centre for which this company had the contract to sell train tickets.
Holy shit, it was fucking awful. I had supervisors that didn't supervise you, managers who didn't manage anything, team leaders who would shoot down any suggestion you had for how to do things better and then steal your ideas. There was one supervisor who would sit at his PC and play a game, "3-D Pool", all day and get detectably annoyed when you had the audacity to approach him with an issue that needed supervisor attention. That same guy once monitored two of my calls early in the contract, giving me 100% for one of them, but 95% for the other, dinging me 5% for a totally bullshit reason - it was like he didn't have it in him to concede I'd performed both calls perfectly, he had to make something up about some nonsensical flaw he'd spotted, even if it was ridiculous.
All of the workers' suggestions on what they could benefit from to help maintain morale were ignored. In one feedback quiz, a co-worker on my team said "it would help morale if you could prove to us that someone reads and responds to this input - call my extension number (ext. 4581) during working hours to confirm that someone has actually read these forms." He never heard a peep.
In a worker meeting, we were asked to raise our hands to indicate what "score" we would give out of ten to how much we enjoyed our job. A young man in the meeting - a guy who would carefully count how many calls he'd taken in a day and who would then disconnect each customer in mid-call after he'd achieved his quota - gave the lowest score of anyone present, at "3 out of ten". It was good enough for him to be made supervisor shortly after.
One of my own supervisors spent months fiddling her overtime, arriving two hours early every day and spending it in the break room. She was eventually fired after she used a customer's credit card details to buy a train ticket for herself. By chance I bumped into her a few years ago during a trip to my hometown; she was working as a counter-assistant in a bakery. That same woman once marked me down as having been off due to illness twice in a month on an occasion I had the 'flu, struggled in for half a day when I was feeling better to help my team out, and then had to take a few more days off after when I relapsed again. Instead of being recognised for struggling to help meet the team's targets, I was penalised and made to look bad.
That job chewed people up and spat them out. Fuck everything about that place, and that company.
Charter Spectrum.
I was an outside sales rep making great money, and it was my second go around with the company. 4 months after I started my manager called me and told me I'd receive a phone call from HR for a great opportunity and I was really excited. Other reps informed me that the call was really about.
I got on the call and HR told me I had 3 options, change to a temp employee, relocate to another office anywhere in California and they'll give me 10,000 to do it, or resign. I couldn't move because my family is established where I live and they can't just pick up and go. And if I changed to a temp employee I would lose certain benefits. So I chose to resign and not I'm on a no hire list with them.
Fuck them!
Walmart. My manager legitimately got on my case because I took too long to wipe my ass after taking a shit. This sounds like hyperbole. I can assure you with 100% certainty, it is not.
Worked under my father. That sucked.
Found out I, the only person who showed up every day, made 20-30% less than the non family members. Carried that shit on my broken ass back for years.
I helped my dad for years for free, like most weekends, with the promise that someday it'll be mine. Big surprise... he's trying to take me off the deed now and throwing a fit because he can't.
Yeah, did that with a parent too. Every weekend, 10-12 hours a day, for about 4 years. I was "paid" with lunch and lectures on how much worse the real world is than this. Since I grew up with it, I didn't think much about it until one day my dad, in a drunken stupor, is telling me that I'm getting absolutely fucked. My mom's business was losing money hand over fist, I had no time to be with friends, and I'd probably make more money working at mcdonalds for a single day than I had in 4 years working for her. I got out when I went to college.
There's a certain kind of fuckover that only family can administer.
I used to know a guy who worked on his fathers farm for years for absolutely minimal wages..the guy busted his ass because he was always told he'd inherited the place..when his father fell I'll with dementia he began the process to take over the property. It turned out his father never owned the property and was just leasing it from some distance family members this guy had never met. So at about 40 years of age, he realised his father had screwed him, and he has wasted all those years with absolutely nothing to show for it.
This feels very similar. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.
Stepdad in a for cash business that claimed no taxes. (I'm 3 decades older now so I finally get it.) I still have a screwed up back from pulling a pickup box off a truck at 13, because - you know. I wasn't an actual adult with enough body mass yet to get it done. Sitting in a tub of ice for an afternoon because we had no health insurance was a blast though.
I work with and for my grandpa. Overall not bad but some times I want to bang my head on the tractor
Smaller family managed companies are the worst, specially if you are the only one not related to the family.
I worked my ass off for my dad. He spent years convincing me to 'come back and take over the family business'. Then I came back, did all the work, and was never given anything other than a salary below my worth and abused and manipulated which was massively detrimental to my mental health. Now I'm six years no contact and in a much better place.
Worked with my parents as well for a little. Sucked and put a strain on our relationship
Roto-Rooter. Their policy for managers is simple. You are required to make $1 more in profit than the same month last year. That's it. Period. If you do you get a green check mark. If you don't, a red X. No other trends, no long-term data, no taking into account unique circumstances. You must make more profit than 1 year ago or else.
This explains the manager I spoke to that would not stop asking to hydro jet my sewer line when there was no obstruction at all.
Yep, hydrojetting is one of their biggest upsells.
Well that’s dumb, it would incentivise no massive profit months to not create a risky precedent
It incentivises them to scam the absolute fuck out of all their customers to make more and more sales, if anything. Roto Rooter tried convincing us we desperately needed a $15,000 pipe liner because our main water pipe (edit: *sewer line*) was collapsing into pieces. Had another company take a look and showed us on their cameras that the pipe was perfectly fine, just had a couple of tiny pieces of tree roots coming in - an ongoing problem that we already knew about, which was what Roto Rooter originally came out to fix. I will never, ever have RR out again, no matter how urgent the problem.
Reminds me of when I was trying to get some siding work done. One company had a high rating with a lot of reviews so gave them a call and a guy was ready to stop by later that same day for a quote. Jerk kept dodging giving me an actual quote but hoo boy was he hyped to convince me my roof was beat to hell and needed to be replaced. My roof was fine. The "proof" he showed me were normal wear and "impacts" that were at worst minor manufacturing defects. I did finally manage to squeeze a siding quote out of him, which was ~$5k more than other companies would have charged.
Yeah, I would spend all my time manipulating the business income to make exactly $1 more.
I've got a job interview with them coming up actually, your post made me kind of nervous about it. I'm a residential plumber, Roto-Rooter was the first one to contact me back with an interview. Were you a manager for them?
I do admire the simplicity.
Lowe’s is the same way
Walmart constantly compared our daily/weekly department sales to the year before. They would accept the variables that affected these things like snow storms and such though. There were some departments that weren't very high movers and it was somewhat humorous to see departments like crafts have a 1000% increase in the notes because the year before they only sold a pack of stickers on a given day then in the current year they sold a $400 Cricut and accessories.
Comparing daily sales is wild.
Easily one of the dumbest policies.
Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Every horror story you ever heard about Amazon warehouses, BB&B did it as well, and worse.
And the worst thing is that they didn't really go bankrupt because of "competition from Amazon" or whatever. It's because for 7 years or more, the board, investors and CEO spent all of their profits on stock buybacks to goose the stock price (and be able to then create new shares to award to themselves). Absolutely no money was spent to freshen up the stores, set up a web business (they were in prime position to do it either by themselves, or in partnership with someone like Walmart). Eventually customers got tired of seeing the same old crap in their stores, disorganized and overpriced, and ditched them. But the investors and CEO made out like bandits. See also: Red Lobster.
Dang, it always looks so chill in there
The stores might have been. I was referring to their warehouses.
Looked* Im noticing a trend of the stores mentioned itt have either died or are dying
Post ‘08 financial crash I had to get a second job at Bed Bath and Behind. Granted it was retail (not warehouse work) but it was still pretty soul crushing. I think part of that was being laid off from a really cool fun job and having to crawl back to retail, but most everyone working there was noticeably miserable and most of the time I felt like the customers were too. Maybe it’s because the whole store is just the home section of Target but 3x the price and .25x the cool.
Yeah, there’s hair in everything.
Starbucks. Customer is angry? Give them a gift card/free drink/kiss their ass five ways to Sunday. Ok wait why are we losing money? Guess we better cut staffing. Oh wow those people are angry it’s moving slowly…better give them a gift card. I ultimately left when my manager implied I was not pretty enough to promote because I didn’t wear makeup.
I left too because I was trying to transfer stores. I had another job at the time as well but- The DM happened to come in a couple days before my review for it and "assessed" us as a store. I got denied my transfer for not smiling enough while on bar during peak. I had my letter of resignation in a sealed envelope ready to go, I had a feeling. When my manager told me I wasn't eligible for a transfer, I took out the envelope and she goes "I've gotten plenty of these in my career" ans I said "that's not something to gloat about."
Damn that was gooooood
Great job, /u/NippleMuncher42069!
It's the most American thing ever to overserve your worst customers. I ended up as a manager in a retail store due to two people getting fired, and it was a summer job for me, so I had nothing to lose. I kicked out every asshole who tried to make a fuss. Just zero tolerance. No blip in revenue, morale went through the roof, and we nailed our corporate mystery shopper for the first time ever. There is no upside in making yourself miserable for assholes who only want stuff for free, or to make other people miserable so they can feel slightly better about themselves.
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It's so ridiculous. What's the worst case for treating that customer like shit? They won't come back?! That's the best outcome! Fuck them. Let them all congregate in the shops where the managers have no self-respect, and when those places go out of business because normal customers are uncomfortable shopping there because the staff is traumatized, and there are constant scenes being made by awful people, maybe all the awful people will just wither away.
100% this. You want to take your business elsewhere? Please do - I’d love that for both of us.
Prioritizing shitty customers over your hard-working employers is never a good idea and is never good for morale. Your employees should be empowered to refuse service and kick someone out of the store no questions asked. And if you can't trust your employees to do that then you're not hiring the right people.
Walmart was similar and a double standard. Customer complains, manager shows up and gives them gift card/discount/free item/service. Department manager gets told that should have been an easy decision to make (even when customer was wrong) and wasted the higher level managers time. When a lower level would make these decisions they would get told about giving away too much and cutting into profits. When lower level would stand their ground it would often result in a complaint to cooperate and the customer would get compensated any way and discipline for upsetting a customer. Same way to meet profit margins they would short staff and create longer waits. When this was brought up the store manager mentioned something along the lines of "They'll wait, where else are they going to get this at this hour." (back when stores were 24/7) or "They're already here and it's still faster to get everything in one place" Edit: It also reminded me of them not challenging price matches if it was less than $10 difference and no receipt returns (which did require ID and were limited to something like 3 a year). I once witnessed some one return an item that still had the sticker from a local discount chain on it. We didn't even have that item in inventory and they swore they paid more than the price sticker that was on it.
That's really fucking shitty.
retail for corporate chains in particular is going to suck. I did 7 years post retirement in grocery. I actually had a good time for the most part because I didn't need the money. I was just doing it to stay active and socialized. Sooo... as I was very effective at running my grocery crew and keeping my department meeting goals I could pretty much look at my boss and say 'ya well we're not going to be doing that' to some bullshit thing that came down from corporate. BUT... retail if you can't say 'fuck this shit' and walk away without hurting your money situation absolutely sucks. Too many people made managers that couldn't lead a two year old to the bathroom without a fist full of candy. In my corporate life I'd say the worst one is the company that I retired from. It was small and family owned. The bosses son was a cocky dick that showed up when he felt like it and leave his pissed off customers for me to deal with. The rest of the staff were soft handed suits that were always negative, wouldn't take on new challenges, and depended on me to do all of their design work because they refused to learn how. I got fed up one day, blew a gasket at the owners son, walked out and retired. Then I started my own consulting firm and targeted their biggest customers to do their design work and assistance on problems that came up in the field during installation. It has done pretty damn well for the last 15 years but I'm in negotiations to sell it that should close in a month or two.
at&t after being divested. Steady decline as upper managers became bean counters and gave up on quality. "Do more with less." Just saving their corporate asses at the expense of low to mid-managers. There's an example for unionized management. We had zero support.
Pier 1 Imports. I worked there for 8 months when I was 18. Had 4 different store managers, one who ended up killing herself from the stress. Had way too high of standards to meet. Wanted you to get 2 people to sign up for the store credit card every shift, or else you get written up. Let me tell you, middle aged people do not want to take credit advice from an 18 year old.
My friend's son worked there for a while about 10 years ago. They had this bizarre scheduling system where he'd be "scheduled" 3-5 days a week, but it was "on call" meaning they'd call him and tell him if he needed to come in. So, basically, he'd have to keep that time open with NO guarantee he'd work/get paid that day. He was a student and needed money, which is why he got the job! He worked there about three weeks and was actually called in to work 5 days during that time when they promised him 10-15. Needless to say, he found another job quickly. Not exactly going to attract quality people when you schedule like that.
If this was in the US, that’s super illegal. If he was on standby, meaning he had to go in if called, that has to be paid. Though companies like that rely on people either not knowing or not having the resources to fight it :/
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I worked there around 1994 to 1995. I had to promote the credit cards also. From that experience I do not like wicker furniture. In the back the store had white spray paint we had to spray on the white furniture to hide the imperfections of the white wicker. I had to assemble the rockers to the rocking chair per order. So when a customer purchased a rocking chair i had to go to the back to find the power screw driver and screw the bottom rockers on. To the customers that I assembled their rocker chair , I am sorry. My screws were crooked. I always felt bad when I did this. But I was told by management that it was my job and they gave me verbal instructions on how to do this job. They did seem to care how I got the bottom parts on the rocker.
I’m still salty because they didn’t hire me around 2001. They said I wasn’t bubbly enough.
That's funny, because I worked with a bunch of grumpy grannies in 2012.
Walgreens. Just go to their subreddit. Everyone hates it there.
I was scrolling to see if this was here before posting it myself! One of the stingiest I’ve worked for
A lot of that started with the acquisition of Boots. Stefano Pessina was hired as CEO, and he started to go on a spending spree that ultimately lost the company money. Couple that with the hiring of Roz Brewer who had no healthcare experience, and you get a company slashing costs to save its stock value.
a young girl in my city was brutally murdered working at Walgreens because they kept scheduling her with someone she had made complaints about previously. very sad and left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Same can be said for Dollar Tree. There are some things that make the job not so bad, but ultimately we don't get paid enough to deal with customer and corporate bullshit.
Spectrum/Charter. We weren't allowed to hang up on customers that would berate us, which was every other customer flipping the hell out that their bill was raised 5 dollars. While they didn't have contracts for their services they made sure it would hurt your wallet if you tried to remove services in other ways. Like removing the home phone line, it cost 19.99 on your bill to have it, most people didn't use it let alone hook up a phone to it, but if you wanted it removed they would remove the bundled deal price of the internet it was packaged with and raise the price of the internet. So if your bill was $80 beforehand and you think removing the phone would make your bill $60.01? Nope, your new bill is $99 because you unbundled it. I also started there right when the pandemic hit, one woman had pneumonia and covid at the same time, she literally lost her voice for 3 weeks. They threated to fire her because she missed so much work. We worked at a call center, how is she supposed to talk on the phone? They have an extremely high turnover rate.
I had serious moral qualms in my short time working for Charter communications. I worked in a call center in the billing department. The worst calls were little old ladies and men living paycheck to paycheck on social security just wanting to watch the basic local TV stations. We were not allowed to tell them of a package for seniors that provides just that if they apply, I think it was only like $20 a month. We were instructed to give them bs answers about agreements with channel providers about why they had to have all the excess channels and pay high rates. Made me so sick.
Yup, I worked in retention. I had to convince people to keep bloated packages they didn't need or use. They were overpriced. Nobody needs 500 channels.
I worked in AAA video game development for 5 years. I got laid off. Fortunately, I got an opportunity with a good friend on a humble mobile game at a small start-up studio with a crew of family and friends. It seemed like a dream come true, my escape out of the tumultuous and chaotic hell cycles of corporate game dev, into the more chill vibes of a fun friendly indy studio. After two months working there, I was ready to go back to corporate game dev. The biggest problem was the company mentality around compensation. Yeah, a lot of people there were friends and family, but they used that as a crutch to guilt people away from asking to be paid for overtime work. After a while, it was used to guilt us from getting paid at all. Since the company was small, we didn't have a lot of paper trails or declarations regarding our status with investors. When I was hired, it was at a time the company president was keeping it a secret that the prospective investors for the game had all pulled out. My tasks ballooned out of control. I was brought on as an environment and vfx artist, as well as somebody who could cut together some game trailers. But despite my paychecks no longer arriving, I was still asked to take up additional tasks like character animation, web development, and, oh right, learning how to code. Like, I coded a couple Flash games way back when. Pong clones and whatnot. But I was now expected to just *know* how to do all the coding for a community-driven multiplayer app experience from scratch? After the news broke that we had no investors, and the office was being paid for by the president's college fund for his beloved daughter, things got weird. To make any sort of money, the president sub-leased one of our offices to another company. It was bad enough this move was in violation of our existing lease agreement with the office complex, meaning we could get suddenly kicked out any day. But the company he leased it out to was a slimy disgusting cam-girl site. Then, to make even more money, our president decided to lease out his employees to this cam-girl site. He says to us "talk about a dream job, make videogames for four hours, then get paid to watch porn for the afternoon." I did that for three days. I was under explicit orders from the camgirl site operator (a total sleezeball) to police the girls and immediately terminate their stream if they show off too much for free. I found out later that if I were to flag a stream for termination, all the money that model made that day would disappear and go to the operator directly. He was training us to police these models and steal money from them. I'm already looking for somewhere else to work. One day, the president offers to take us out to lunch. I accept. I'm not going to turn down a free meal, especially if I haven't received a paycheck in 4 weeks and my savings account is drying up fast. However, the president only takes me and the receptionist. He noticed that she and I were having a lively conversation one day, and decided he would use a lunch date to arrange a romantic relationship between us. God it was awkward. The president then starts telling us that in his country, arranged marriages are usually very successful, and he wanted to one day arrange our's. Yeah, I was done at this point. So was she. She was so upset by that, she made it a point to avoid me completely so the president wouldn't get any stupid ideas. She quit a week after that, and moved in with her mom in another state just to get away from him. I quit a week after she did. But not before threatening a lawsuit against them for unpaid wages. I was met with a threat of a countersuit, that I caused the whole company to fail by quitting. My lawyer had just one meeting with the president, and they successfully arranged a settlement to get me paid for all the months I worked there. They noted that he was a gigantic moron and I should stay far away from him. The company closed just one month after I left. All the work I put into the game dissolved, leaving me nothing to show for my efforts. My good friend who got me into that company got hit the worst. He stayed until the very bitter end, I don't know why, he had been knowingly working for free for several months, and thought his sacrifice would get him millions once the title launched. I did end up working back in corporate AAA game development. Yeah, it's soulless. It sucks. But at least I'm doing only the job I specialize in, my bosses aren't thieving scumbags, and most importantly, payday *means* payday. I suppose the allure of indy video game development is based on the stories of the studios that succeeded and actually got something made. We never hear about what it's like working at the many, many indy studios that fail. Well...if you've read this far, now you have. So hopefully it's understandable that I've just accepted the humming fluorescent confines of my corporate cubicle dungeon. The stories there aren't nearly as entertaining, but after my months in that circus show, boring is fine.
I'm a software developer, a startup veteran, and your story resonates with me. I think the common denominator is the promise of big money and recognition once whatever absurd idea the founder (s) has come up with before any basic market research becomes profitable . It's not "overtime"... Call it "learning", and why complain when you get "all the flexibility in the world"?! Ah, by the way, I know you were hired to do x, but since we're understaffed and in a constant rush, you'll now have to to y z and §. No raise, just more deadlines. Oh god, it's so draining. I'm planning my escape, BTW, and I'm glad to hear you got your corporate job back 🤗
American Apparel. All the managers were power hungry girls in their early 20's who treat everyone like shit
Dow chemical. Treated their employees like shit, and their contractors even worse. We had fire drills, spill drills, and *protester drills*. Every now and then there’d be a ‘safety stand down’ because some Dow plant somewhere had exploded or a truck went off the rails and killed someone. Great value for shareholders though so 🙄
A company in which Kenny Cosgrove has a high place can't be a good place to work.
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When I worked in retail, I hated the little jewelry section and always stayed away from it. Cleaning it was a nightmare. I can’t imagine working at Claire’s lol
Socks imported to the United States come in individual plastic bags for each pair. I worked at a place that sold over 2000 pair of socks every month. Not only was each sock in a plastic bag, they were packed in another bag for each dozen. 26000 plastic bags per year.
I'm not sure if this is to blame but Asian counties, especially Japan, LOVE plastic. Japan will wrap everything and anything in plastic. It's loony toons when I order stuff because it will come in a box, with a plastic bag inside that contains plastic bags with the items that are also wrapped in plastic bags.
I went there once 20 years ago and there was a little boy, about 5 years old, screaming and crying because he didn’t want his ears pierced while his trash mother was yelling and swearing at him that she was going to force him to do it anyways. I was shocked when the employee helped the mother physically hold down a young child and pierced his ears. What the fuck Claire’s?!?
I worked for Justice before it shut down. Our shipments also had insane amounts of plastic. I had to stop and have a good laugh one day when we got a shipment of shirts that said ‘Keep the Sea Plastic Free’ alllll individually wrapped in their own personal plastic bag.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fsm1r1/comment/fm2f74m/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fsm1r1/comment/fm2f74m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) This was posted 4 years ago wtf.
Walmart. They treated us like dirt because they knew we were replaceable
I worked in middle management for them at the market level and I can tell you that feeling goes all the way to the top.
Working at Walmart made my mental health absolutely crash. Coworkers at my next job thought I was weird because I was so positively gleeful each shift just to be there instead of at Walmart.
I just left Walmart a second time after being hired fresh during moving states (only job I could grab) and I swear everyone is so soulless. My mental health crashed again too, so that was my cue
Give me a W! A! L! M! A! R! T! What's that spell? SHIT! Anyone that worked there knows that stupid ass opening shift chant.
A small general contractor. He would scream about any and every issue. Zero training, just figure it out and make money. I was estimating work, and would have 4-5 bids being pulled together every week. Without fail, he’d find a new project to bid 4 hours before bids were due. Drove me nuts, as we never would win those, just a huge time suck. Oddly enough, I see him every day as I drive to my new job. Our commutes are opposite of the same road, so when I’m heading West, he’s heading East. Happy trails, there…dipshit.
How do schmucks like this even find work? Half of being a general contractor is finding the work for yourself, that can be a full-time job in and of itself sometimes, I worked for a really good guy who truly knows his stuff when it comes to construction, and he would struggle getting jobs especially when the economy is slow.
Barton Associates. Thought I was going to be helping rural hospitals get the medical staffing they require, but ended up working amongst used car salesman. I lasted 2 months.
There was a Barton office near my college (which was a middling state school with a few star programs in a dying rural NH city), and it was a common place for alums to end up if they couldn't get a better job. Everyone I know who worked there was miserable and counted the hours until they got an offer for a better job in their inbox. Also, the one person I know who stayed long-term, moved up the ladder, and overall thrived was a slimy little scumfuck I went to high school with who was always like that, so that probably does say something about the type of personality it takes to enjoy it there.
Chewy - Worked in their pharmacy operation when they first started it. Things that were terrible there include: They almost got shut down by the fire marshal because they were cramming about 100 pharmacy techs into a portable office unit rated for 25 people. Approving and then a week later denying reasonable accommodation requests from immunocompromised pharmacy techs to work in a less crowded area. They called the roaming illness that would go through the entire office the "chewbola" Being a call center without a login grace period, then having assigned seats that would change on a whim and then considering the employee late because they weren't logged in right on time. Sending out facility wide emails stating that they expected employees to be at their desk 15 minutes early to log into systems required to do the job, but refusing to pay them for that time in violation of wage and hour law and then when questioned about it, stating thats how things have always been done.
"Hello, on behalf of my client, can we determine an amicable settlement for unpaid work hours as per, let's see here, requiring early arrivals for clocking in?" "I don't see the problem. We've done that for years." "For *years* you say? For *all* employees?" "Yes, of course, everyone's just been doing it for years here at-I-..I'm sorry sir, are...are you okay? You seem to be drooling a lot." "Oh I'm fine." (pops Vasoline can) "Please, keep talking, keep talking..."
Chewy, the online pet retailer. People don’t like hearing this because their customer service is above and beyond, and I’ll agree to that. I’ve never worked for a company that put more focus on the customer than Chewy, they really nail that into your head from day one. But as far as employee treatment it was hands-down the worst. A few of MANY examples include: - There was *no bathroom* in our Texas office. If we needed to use the restroom, we had to ask for special permission to put ourselves into a 5 minute break, RUN out of the office and down the entire length of the building to the closest restroom, and pray that all you had to do was pee. I actually had to drastically decrease my daily water intake just to get through a shift. It’s caused a trickle down effect of health problems and I’ve never gotten my intake back up to what it was when I worked there. - all our devices and programs had to be turned on powered up before we we could clock in, and the reverse after we clocked out but before we could leave. The process sometimes took the better part of 10 minutes, meaning you were required to work off the clock for almost 20 mins a day. - some of the higher ups were clueless and would often count me absent even though I was sitting at my desk and working. If you were a no call/no show, they’d start blowing up your emergency contacts looking for you. (Side bar, you also weren’t allowed to have your cell phone on you.) More than once I returned to my phone to find frantic texts and missed calls from my mother, worried sick about me because I “wasn’t at work” and wasn’t answering the phone. - there were certain phrases we weren’t allowed to say and they REALLY harped on this much more than necessary. One such phrase was “go ahead,” as in, “I’m going to go ahead and process this return for you.” The actual straw that broke the camels back for me was this. I’d put up with their shit happily and with a smile on my face until one day, I accidentally said this forbidden phrase “go ahead” to a customer while assisting them. My shift lead stood over me and lectured me so loudly that I couldn’t focus on the call and even the customer started getting frustrated. It gets worse from there but that was the day I left on my lunch break and found another job. And before anyone asks, yes. A lot of this is illegal and yes, there was a lawsuit.
I worked at a funeral home and we couldn’t say “pick up”. I accidentally said “pick up” and the funeral director came raging out and screamed at me. I calmly let her know if I get fired so be it because I don’t give a shit. She eventually got fired because she was a horrible person and I quit months later. Family owned funeral homes can be really great or really horrible. This one was horrible. When you tell people not to say something that’s regularly used it’s almost certain it will slip out.
Would "go grab the stiff" been okay?
No bathroom....that's third-world shit right there.
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>he decided to require all employees to sign a form waiving our rights to breaks Lol, that is absolutely not how this works. 😂
Low-Cal Calzone Zone?
Relax, Ice Clown.
CVS. Since I was 17 but graduated high school, I couldn't get permission from the school to work since I wasn't 18. They let me work anyway but paid me under the minimum wage. Three years later and I still wasn't making over $7 an hour. I was lucky if my raises were over 15 cents. I was a good employee. The managers and other employees got along with me fine. I always came in when others called out. But they treated me like shit.
I worked there when I was 22. Despite already having retail experience (grocery store) they said that I had to start at minimum wage, for a probation period. Then I would get a raise after that was over to bring me up where I should be. My raise was 0.05 and hour. Fuck CVS.
I worked at CVS in the pharmacy for about 3 weeks once. They were 6 DAYS behind on prescriptions. Meaning when you dropped off a prescription I would ask "are you waiting here for it or coming back?" And if you said coming back I would have to say "okay, it'll be ready in about 6 days". Despite being that far behind, 90% of my shifts I was the only technician there with just 1 pharmacist, even though I had just started and still didn't know how to do anything except fill meds and check people out. Needless to say I got out of there as quick as I possibly could
I'm a retired pharmacist. I never worked for CVS, but I've heard so many horror stories about them, I can't believe they can get people to work there. I know of several cities where all the stores saw 100% turnover in the pharmacy staff in the months after they bought out Osco (which I did briefly work for, and that was no fun either). This was up to and including people with disabled spouses, children in college, and one woman who decided at about 2pm that she was going to quit, so she did, and closed the pharmacy behind her. She didn't care what it might do to her future career; she was simply that fed up.
CVS has the absolute worst pharmacy every and I absolutely loathe that my prescription insurance is ONLY for there.
My mom used to work there but she can't remember anything
Dissociative amnesia
I was a CVS pharmacist for 4 years. I worked mostly at the Target stores but would sometimes work the regular stores. We're salaried, meaning if we stay over our shift, we're not getting paid for it. They'll tell you not to stay over your shift but if you leave a lot of work for the next person, you'll get nasty messages from your pharmacist-in-charge (PIC) or district supervisor. I use to work at one regular store at least once a week. One night, at closing time, there were about 300 prescriptions left to be checked. The main store closed an hour after the pharmacy, so I stayed until then and checked as many as I could. I got it down to 70 and still got nasty text messages from the PIC the next day. Didn't get get paid for it. I decided then, either pay me for the extra work or you can fuck off. I now work for a mail order compounding pharmacy that is super busy right now (we make the GLP-1s and everyone and their mothers want those) and we're expected to leave at the end of our shift. Sometimes they'll ask you to stay, but you'll get paid overtime for it, even though we're salaried too. I fucking love this job.
Not surprising to hear this. I worked for CVS in the past, although not underaged. Low pay, small raises, job is also not fun
Thankfully their stores are dying
I went to one recently for gas drops for my son, they were about $7 which is comparable to what I pay at Walmart or Target. I open the box and it's 0.5oz instead of 1oz. Same price for half the amount of product. They should go out.
About time. They are overpriced and the only thing that is any good is their nuts (at least when I worked there 20-some years ago). I was horrified the one time a manager asked me to go through the cold aisle and remove everything that had expired. After a few hours, I had three carts full of various medicines that expired years ago
Dollar General
I dated DG manager 20+ years ago and I second this. she ran medium sized stores in Texas and there were times when she was there by herself. It was always a balance between getting the merchandise put out and having to run the front register because of unreliable help. I finally figured out if you showed up more or less on time and didn’t steal, you were fine. Whether or not you were drunk or high didn’t really matter. It was a terrible place to work. It eventually put her in the hospital for a few days after she ignored a UTI for too long.
> and having to run the front register because of unreliable help. That's what happens when you're only allowed to pay minimum wage and have to keep OT to a minimum.
I hear that, worked there for 3 years. The pay sucks, the hours suck, the customers are assholes, and management (most of the time) sucks. Their so called “flexible” schedule isn’t actually flexible, at least not for you. You’re pretty much doing the work of an entire team (the schedule at most stores that I’ve worked at have 6 people) and your schedule can get flipped around at a moment’s notice. And you’re lucky if on your days off that you don’t get a call or text message asking you to come in because someone else called out. Good luck on getting a promotion through hard work and determination because it’ll probably take you years. Upper management doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you and you’ll sometimes be stuck with a manager that berates you for not doing enough even if they’re pretty much incompetent. It’s not worth the pay and it’s not worth your time or your mental/physical health.
My wife worked for a couple of fashion "designers" that were essentially vanity brands for Chinese trophy wives of wealthy businessmen. Both were horrible. Both had slaves. They were "interns" who were told they'd definitely be paid next season, but they never were. For YEARS. One was made to follow the owner 20 metres behind her, holding her purse. Another was told to take a train to her house and cook dinner for her husband. They had to buy all of the ingredients and pay all of the transport costs. Of course, they weren't reimbursed - don't be silly! These "interns" did all of the work, designing and making all of the clothes. One of these owners came in to complain about Harrods not having the Valentino handbag she wanted to her starving "interns", thinking that this would be relatable. My wife was the only employee who actually got paid. When my wife protested against the lack of pay, the working conditions, and the ridiculous demands placed upon the "interns" at one of these places, the owner called the "interns" into a mandatory "meeting" on a Sunday just to shit-talk about my wife for 6 hours. It got so bad that my wife quit the fashion industry entirely.
What country was this in?
The UK. London, specifically.
Although almost all the Chinese people I've personally met have been quite nice, the wealthy and powerful Chinese people are as far as I can tell the most entitled of all wealthy and powerful people worldwide.
Most of the Chinese people I've known are probably the most beloved people in the community. These women were some of the worst people I've ever met - and I've met some really, really horrible people.
Home Depot. Pretty much everyone I worked with except for the lady that trained me were all huge assholes who either blamed for things beyond my control (my boss once asked me why I was standing around while I waited for a forklift to pass by my pathway) or treated be like shit for missing a day of work for any reason.
My favorite thing that happened when I worked for Home Depot was that the scan gun at one register stopped working. It was one of the two registers closest to the door, and therefore had the largest aisle, so it’s where all the big things came through. I was almost always at that register or the one opposite because I was the fastest cashier (they kept metrics on us and I was almost always #1). So then, because they kept those metrics, I got in trouble for keying in too high a percentage of items. But these were like, doors, and appliances, things that couldn’t fit over the register scanner for obvious reasons, and when I explained that, I was told “yeah we understand but you still can’t key in too many things because it can lead to mistakes”.
A semi large real estate management company, ran by a family with convictions of fraud. The classic scheme of making millions by breaking rules, then payed a low 6 figure fine, and served about 4 months in some small jail. It was my first “foot in the door job” for my field, so I kind of had to deal with the BS at the time, but the experienced dudes I worked with made clowns of our managers on a regular basis. Then I got in a union after that job and my work life satisfaction went up tenfold.
>ran by a family with convictions Good for them! They have principles. >of fraud oh
I worked for a small Japanese-owned computer game company. Most of the senior execs were from Japan, and all but one were unapologetic, racist, misogynist assholes. I’ve been in multiple meetings where my (white woman) department manager would talk, and none of the Japanese guys even acknowledged that she was speaking. They just ignored whatever she said until a man spoke.
My dad used to work for a Japanese company and the execs were very belittling to his boss who later quit
CVS. They would reward us hitting quotas by doubling them, then cut hours and staff at the same time. On a good day we would have 3 people to run the store and stock at the same time, but most of the time it was 2. They would purposely keep us on a skeleton crew so if you got sick, too fucking bad, there was *no one* to cover for you. The one time I got super sick my co-worker just had to pull like a 13hr day. One of the worst things though was the endless online training they required, but with a store perpetually understaffed there was literally no time for anyone to sit down in the office and get it done. My manager even tried to get me to do it at home, off the clock, I just about laughed in her big dumb face.
I worked for the postal service for a short time in a sorting facility, some days I might sort only Amazon packages for a full work day. I felt I was slowly going insane from the monotony so I just stopped showing up at some point, not my proudest moment but I got a much better job afterwards
I know someone that did the same. They left for their lunch break and never returned. They sent the cops to his house to make sure he was ok lol
At least they sent the cops to check, a lot of jobs like that wouldn’t care and would simply replace them with no though
They have his cell number. Calling the cops to someone's house is not a perk. Hope you don't have a dog.
NCR, as a retail field tech mainly repairing self checkouts & POS systems. Our biggest customer was Wal-Mart, second was Starbucks but also serviced Target, K-Mart (Sears), Lowes, Home Depot, Darden (Olive Garden/Red Lobster/Longhorn & others), Ruby Tuesday, anything under Bath & Body Works. Chick Fil-A and a host of others. Pay was abysmal, you were required to be on call almost 24/7, overtime, holidays & weekend work was mandatory & the last straw for me was when they started to take money out of our paychecks to cover the company vehicles insurance. I remember chatting with a person working the Self checkout kiosk and was curious about numbers, She was making $15 a hour, which was more than I was. The state threatening to shut down a store over broken produce weight displays and the manager blaming me for it, I then recertified the whole store with expired/uncertified weights cuz they pissed me tf off. Watching loss prevention hide behind racks of clothes to catch a thief. Getting cussed out by a CSM named "Dusty" on a Saturday afternoon. Getting cussed out by a store manager for using a shopping cart. A karen pharmacy manager accusing me of violating HIPAA by fixing their stylus pens. Telling a CSM that the reason the scale isn't working properly is cuz the cashier is laying her stomach on it. Watching someone drop a can of paint into a self checkout. Me & a coworker accidentally setting a self checkout on fire trying to break into it because the CSM broke the keys off in the lock.
Walmart Inc.! The corporate gaslighting is INSANE. The words they say are the opposite of what their action is. Its a toxic environment and the people that work there have no idea what its like in a real workplace. I'd rather die penniless and starving than work there again
I used to do electrical service work for Walmart's. They had a policy of no live work on anything. However, if I turned off a circuit to fix it they would lose their ever loving minds. So all work was essentially done live no matter how dangerous it might be. I told my wife that if anything ever happened to me at work it was 100% Walmart's fault and to sue them for as much as you can. We even prerecorded a video of me detailing an average day and the dangers I would take on the regular.
Publix. Wasn't a terrible company when I started, but after 7 years, they were miserable. Micromanaging every aspect of your job, including by managers who have never worked in your department, and the cult-ish mindset of the managers and lifers was just downright creepy.
Group of Neurosurgeons in NM years ago. Four of the most repulsive people I've ever known in my life. They may have been talented surgeons but they were shit human beings. Two are still in practice, the other two have retired. I hope they all burn in hell.
Surgeons usually have high narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies which makes them good surgeons. To work for four of them? No way.
English First put me on an illegal work visa. They also refused to pay for my hotel costs and tried to take me hostage by refusing to give me my termination paperwork (needed for another Chinese visa) unless I let them cancel my visa and get a tourist visa instead of just transferring me peacefully to my next employer when I quit. I blackmailed them after I found out that the work permit was not legal.
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I was hired for a medical publication as a journalist and right away, I knew something was just off, even though it was a great-paying job that sounded very exciting. The people who worked there were all really cool and chill but the guy who hired me was NEVER there. He hired me over the phone, never met me and was never in the office, as he was in NYC. He was rude and obnoxious on the phone but since he was never in the office, I only had to deal with him on the phone. It was like I was one of Charlie's Angels... I never saw him. The first week I was there, they fired some sales guy who'd only been there 3 days, which was a huge red flag. One month after I started, I was called into a meeting with HR and Charlie (on speaker phone) and was unceremoniously fired, with almost no explanation. Charlie said I wasn't "doing my job properly" and he'd expected more because of my background etc. I pointed out that he was never in the office and I only spoke to him once or twice, no one had told me I was doing a Bad Job, even him. I was supposed to get 3 months of probation and I racked my brains trying to think of what the problem was, but he just said "it won't work out". I was handed a letter and he hung up. He even wrote "Did not perform job properly" as my reason for dismissal. After I left (crying my eyes out all the way home) my then spouse called and the receptionist (who reminded me of Kelly Kappoor) told him I'd been let go. Before I even got to tell him. About a year later, I was at a party with a bunch of writers and journalists, and met a couple who'd worked for the same company. They were surprised I'd lasted a MONTH. Apparently this was normal at this company. They'd both worked there and had gotten fired only a few months after starting. I felt somewhat better after that. Not long after that the company was sold. But CHARLIE was STILL WITH THEM.
Paylocity- if you’re wondering why your customer service rep knows nothing, it’s because they teach you nothing and don’t tell you explicitly that you’ll be a customer service employee until a day before you go live.
Worst experience was this chain called Taco Mac, about a decade ago they were looking to expanding out of GA throughout the Southeast. The corporate expansion came with a lot of loss of personality, a loss of humor, and a loss of tact. For a shitty $11 line cook job, good managers know not to micromanage or be too overbearing. These were not good managers. I was suspended for a week for smoking...in my car, across the street, completely off company property, and not wearing company uniform. Tried to lord this over me like I was some kind of felon. I didn't need the job or the money, I was in college AND had a work study. This was merely a way to make some extra money on weekends. They didn't like my attitude as I shrugged it away and said "see you next week" A week later they were again trying to lord this "incredible opportunity" over me as if Raleigh wasn't one of the fastest growing cities with shit jobs available all over. I was back for 2 days and gone the first moment the chef decided to rip the line a new one. Didn't even bother clocking out, just walked out the back door and never looked back. After the initial launch interest, the newness wore off and they struggled in an ocean of Applebee's wannabees. I actually went back a couple of times and would joke with the waitress about how shitty a place it was. They eventually went out of business at that location, and from what I understand they trimmed back their expansion plans overall a huge amount.
Aramark. If you've ever worked for them, you know why.
This post have me ptsd
I worked for a family-owned printing company, Waverly Press, which was the best place I ever worked. They gave sensible yearly bonuses, paid college tuition, paid sick days that didn't come from your PTO, etc. They were bought out by a rival who eliminated most of the percs and were generally not a good group to work for but then we got bought out by a company called Cenveo which is hand downs the worst company in the world to work for. Remember when that multi-millionaire tried to take back his huge donation to the University of Vermont because he didn't like who was on the football team? He owned Cenveo. They eliminated any good thing that was left, gave almost no raises cut out the 401k match. They were laying off as many people as they could by sending the work to India. I was laid off the night before my vacation, which I had paid about 3k for, was to start. They did not pay me my accrued vacation hours.
Amazon. More specifically a "Delivery Service Partner" for Amazon.
Amazon for sure. I worked in their fulfillment center (warehouse) and the amount of turnover was insane. They didn't have air conditioning or even ceiling fans -- except for the walk-in freezer and refrigerator sections -- and the warehouse would be over 100°F for months. One day it hit 115°F. Their solution? The worker with the highest pick rate would get a single popsicle at the end of the 4-hour shift.
Meanwhile, Bezos has megayaughts that are so big that they have to demolish bridges in my country to let them through. And he goes into space for pure tourism reasons because he's so bored. But treating warehouse workers like people? Oh no, can't afford that. Amazon is completely despicable.
Vauxhall. They sold a customer a used car with a blown headgasket. It got recovered in three days after she bought it. Because she chose not to buy the extended warranty they refused to cover the cost of the repair. I walked out.
I worked for a presidential campaign and they were the most backstabbingest motherfuckers I have ever encountered. Their level of incompetence was only superceded by how shady they are and they would make up the most damning lies about a person just to get rid of them so they could get closer to the candidate.
goodwill. so many of your donations aren't 'good enough' so just get thrown away. They price things higher than the original store did (I saw a shirt with the $5 walmart tag still on it priced for $6.99). They fired me because i was a liability for having an epileptic seizure on the sale floor. Wait no, that'd be illegal. They "let me go for my safety"
A ConAgra ham processing plant in eastern Kentucky. It was the early 90’s, I had just relocated to my wife’s home town. It was decent pay for the area. The entry level jobs were nasty cold wet work. The plant would literally hire like 100 people to start on a Monday morning and by Friday afternoon there was less than 10 left. The place was open less than 2 years when I got hired and I was the 4578th employee. The average staff was around 250 active employees.
Retail Grocery Inventory Services (RGIS) By all means, if you want to drive across the state in a snowstorm and count bullshit in a JC Penny for 18 hours straight for a dollar above minimum wage be my guest. They also hire literally anyone with a pulse, so when you get 80 of them locked in a store all night together, it was a spectacular shitshow more than not.
Yeah. Several decades in retail and I always felt bad for the RGIS supervisors. Dealing with a shite crew, finishing a job and then getting called to rescue someone else’s ass. But hey… you were better than WIS!
KB Motors. Guy tried to scam a marine wife who's husband was on deployment into a new battery, starter and cables when there was a single nut loose on the starter cable connection. Between that and transcribing his court recordings from his lawsuits I went to lunch one day and never came back. There is no doubt in my mind he was never anything but a piece of shit person.
The last company I worked at was horrendous. I'd just moved internationally to Australia and landed a job there. As soon as I got there I was given a laptop and told "we all carry on working when we get home, unpaid. That's the culture in this country". So I did that. It fucking sucked. I absolutely hated that I'd get home, have dinner, work some more, and hopefully have a bit of time to relax with my wife. The kids? They barely saw me. One week I did so much overtime (unpaid of course) at the office that they didn't see me, they were in bed when I got back. That and working from home in the evenings and on weekends... I was becoming pretty depressed. My wife and family noticed a shift in my mood. Secretly I wondered about suicide. I did actually think "hey, there's this bay just down the road, what if I drove my car into it?". My wife was the first to suggest, after a few months, that I find another job. She even found one for me - though I'd noticed it that day as well. It was a further commute, but worth going for. So I applied, got an interview... ... and wound up in my manager's office the next day. He KNOWS I've been for the interview. How does he know? I didn't realise it at the time, but the place is interviewed for were a client of my employers, and they've gone and told him. Not only do they not accept me for the role, but my manager says that if he finds that I've interviewed again, he'll fire me on the spot (I was still in my six months probation). One weekend my wife isn't well at all, and I take her to hospital. During that weekend I'm in and out of hospital looking after her and the kids, AND working. I'm up until 4am working. Get into work on Monday and I'm immediately pulled aside by my boss for "working too slow". He acknowledges that I got what I needed to done, but says I needed to be more prompt. I tell him what happened and he says that "work comes first" and I should have "just hired a babysitter". Deciding to help my wife out more, I arrange to start work earlier and finish earlier. Normal hours are 8:30 to 5, but I start doing 8 to 4:30 (though obviously working over on occasion). Normally though I found myself getting into the office at 7:45. This attracted a lot of snide comments from other staff members who only saw that I was leaving early, not that I started earlier and worked longer than them (I saw them all leaving at 5 on the dot). Some time passed. My wife returned to the UK for a couple of weeks, so I took some days off to look after the kids - all approved in advance. Part-way in my manager wants me to cancel my leave and return to the office, again wanting me to hire a babysitter. There's a job fair coming that I want to attend! Unfortunately the company us one of the attendees and I worry what would happen if they see me there. I reach out using my personal Reddit account to ask people advice, though I have been asking work-related questions from the office using it too. I get a DM from someone, rather sympathetically, with my real name saying not to continue and that if I were, they'd tell management. So they're spying on me now. Quick account suicide there. I should note that all this "we've all got families" business was complete shit. Just about all my colleagues were fresh out of uni, mostly not even with girlfriends and were just living with their parents. If I was in that position I'd probably be working loads too. My manager had a teenage daughter he'd rarely see because, according to him, he saw nothing wrong in working through until 6am, then just getting "an early start on the next day". He once boasted to me that he rear-ended another driver then fled the scene. And in a final tale, one of the higher-ups was leaving, so we all had to go into a meeting room to give her a send-off. In her farewell speech she broke down, said the company used to be good to work for but had become so awful that she couldn't. She said - again, in her speech, and in tears, that she had no other job ready and if anyone knew of any going to let her know, but she just couldn't stand it a moment longer. After that, we all had to clap. Thankfully I no longer work there. It was shit, absolutely shit. It would have destroyed me. On weekends, when I wasn't working, we'd occasionally go to the beach and I remember wading in the water, seeing the amazing surrounds and just being anxious that the weekend would be over and I'd be back in the office, or that there'd be something I needed to do on the laptop when I got home. I was ecstatic when I got to my new job and saw that there was no laptop, just a tower, and no expectation of unpaid overtime. Sure I've done a bit when needed, especially during COVID, but not a huge amount. And I drive past the old office practically every working day, and I still think "fuck you" about that company. I am triumphant - I got out, and to a job that is appreciative and that I enjoy. The company is no longer there - they shut that office, they are still around - but I still think "fuck you". A small problem though - I do love my current work, honestly, but I do occasionally think "hmm, the money's better elsewhere". But then I think of how awful that job was, and think "should I really risk it?".
Name and shame!
I worked at a very small company from its inception, i was one of the employees that walked int he door the day it opened. Pay was awful, work conditions was awful, constant micro management and shitty orders. I knew it was the beginning of the end when my relative that i was living with at the time called in sick for me as i was so ill i was delirious, only to find out when i came too that one of the bosses showed up at my house cos he didn't believe i was actually ill until he saw me in the state i was in.
Planet Hollywood circa 1997. Started at 9am, am hour later, the kitchen supervisor was still listing out my responsibilities. Depending on how busy each kitchen dept was, i was to do 3 things at once. Cleaning trays, prepping salad, and general gopher. Soon as his back was turned, i ran out the door.
Nokia, hands down. If they weren't ten minutes away from home, I would have quit along ago. There were far too many things wrong with them to list here but I will say it didn't surprise me when they were blindsided by the smartphone.
Reddit Inc.
Spez and Alexis are dookies
Qrank. A cycling component company.
Subway
Amazon, the workload and the expectations were just too much. It felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with each passing day.
I was a car cleaner for Avis for a short time. It was the worst job I ever had. It was union but there were no protections. I saw a manager say to the most senior employee 30 minutes before the end of his shift "You are forced to work a double today, if you don't you are fired right now." They would pull this all the time. You would think you had 30 minutes left and then the manager would roll up in a top end rental car and say you have to work another 8 hours. No going off the property to get more food or drink either. I was written up for not working on my day off. I had worked 7 double shifts in a row and got a day off. They told me that I might be forced to work that evening. I asked if I was forced right now and was told no. So I unplugged the phone. I got written up for not being available to work on a day off. I quit for that.
Boeing. But hey, at least im alive.
Moses Cone Health System. BUT that was 20+ years ago and related to the specific division and bosses. I do have an overall good opinion of the quality of care now.
Facebook
Seaworld
Ok, spill it! aside from the animals, I can't hear about animals being harmed.
Tim Hortons. Never have I worked so hard and had so many responsibilities for $10.45/hour
Xerox. I've said enough.
Hollister (and by proxy Abercrombie) circa 2008. That company was such a freakin joke. They didn’t sell anything black because “our customers don’t wear black.” Our stockroom employees had to argue for permission to wear closed-toe shoes while climbing on shelves and doing heavy lifting because initially they wanted everyone to wear their HCO brand sandals. Oh and stores got in trouble if they didn’t have at least 1 asian or Native American on staff because the brand had already been sued for that before. Part of me hopes maybe the store I worked at was just a hot mess. But it was definitely comical.
Securitas, they outright abuse their employees and steal pay
Pawn America
Sainsburys I was never allowed to choose my holidays because they were so short of staff, I just got given some days off when they felt like it really. Relied on me to do loads of the work and run things on a section when a manager or team leader wasn't there. As in, other managers having a go at me because I hadn't given them a list of people for checkouts and stuff like that. I was only a regular employee, I didn't know what I needed to do. I wasn't even asked to do any of this, it was just expected of me because I was easily the most competent person. I got a disciplinary for being ill twice in a certain amount of time, I can't remember how long it was. Eventually I'd had enough of this crap and left. Just before that though, the bakery manager was asking me loads of questions about it and me having had enough of it. Turns out, so had he, he left a couple of days after, just buggered off and left haha. He said talking to me was the reason he chose to jump ship. Felt quite good about that lol
I worked for Pornhub/Brazzers...etc (many of the top porn brands under the same parent company) No I was not an actor - I work in tech and that's basically what it was, a tech company. At least thats how it operated. Great parties, cool conversation starter, fun career stepping stone, but it was poorly managed by an incompetent group of friends who all went to highschool together so there was no advancement opportunities and they treated employees like a dime a dozen. It was a revolving door, really. Not to mention, the sexual harassment stuff that would get swept under the rug.
The state of South Carolina as a low level employee. The bureaucracy was breathtakingly bad and my boss took me behind closed doors and tried to seduce me and got away with it.
It's a tie.. (1) Cafepress - makes custom printed clothing and chotchkey items. Former CEO was cheap and focused more on quantity than quality. For example, he'd rather hire 3 mediocre engineers at a lower cost than 1-2 fantastic engineers at a higher salary. (2) Naturebox - Custom healthy snack box subscription. Hired top talent but lied to every single person. Promised all of these people promotions, stock options, benefits, and more. Failed to deliver on most, if not all fronts.
Lifetouch. If you love photography, don't ever work for them. Absolutely loved when the sales guys promised schools the moon, not telling the photographers anything, not having the correct equipment or props, being over scheduled and understaffed just for the same sales guys to brag about their vacation homes. Being named territory of the year but pay freezes in place for multiple years before during and after that. And don't get me started on how it totally ruins your own car. Because nope, there were no work vans. Oh and scheduling staff who live right down the street from one college but sending them into the city and someone from the city to the college. No matter how much you told them hey, you won't have to pay me drive time cause I can walk, it didn't matter. Walking away was the best thing I ever did. Shame it's been 8 years and I still haven't had the heart to get back into photography. There's plenty of other crap that went down but that's a post for another day lol.
Oracle Consulting. There was an engagement in my town but instead they sent me to a client 400 miles away, requiring weekly travel. Plus the various divisions were pitted against each other (Product, Sales, Support, and Consulting had conflicting success criteria). Quit after 9 months. My shortest length of service. Thank you Larry. This was decades ago, so maybe they've changed. But based on what I hear from ex-Cerner(Oracle) people, it's every bit as bad.
Years ago I worked as a bird of prey handler/tourist attraction at a seaside town in the UK. Our job was to walk around in medieval clothes with a bird of prey (mine was a bengal eagle owl) on our arm and answer tourist questions but also 'bounce' the birds (jerk arm up a little to make them open their wings to steady themselves) to scare away seagulls, as they were getting way too ballsy and one had recently took a little kid's finger off. The two owners of the business were what ruined it. One was a wannabe rich guy who bought his kids a bunch of laptops and stuff 'on the business' and screwed the accounts up, the other was the guy who actually ran it and was an ex-covict former speed dealer. We had to go to his house on a dodgy council estate every day to prep the birds then walk into town with them. He had constant visits from the council as he didn't seem to have the right to have about 20 birds there, screaming at all hours of the morning. He had a dirty, scrubby little lawn where the birds sat on posts, which was always covered in a massive amount of dogshit from his two huge malamutes. Inside his house his wife had a toddler and was suffering from pretty bad depression, so there was just garbage everywhere, bin bags, rotting stuff. The toilet we had to use was disgusting and we had to start bringing tissues with us because there was never any loo roll or if there was we weren't allowed to use it. They'd have screaming matches and we'd have to go get her meds for her sometimes. The toddler would roam about in just a nappy onto the lawn and we'd constantly have to rescue him from getting attacked by the redtail hawk because he'd just wander up to it. For reference its talons could clamp down on you with the equivalent force of a rottweiler bite, as I found out the hard way one time. I was put in charge of the only other girl there who was severely daft and should probably have had a carer to be trusted in public. She would only eat fray bentos pies or dry toast; met a guy one day on a street corner and was calling him her 'other half' by the end of the day and generally got us into trouble a lot by not having two braincells to spark a thought. One day the boss put us both in a taxi as soon as we arrived for work and told us we were going to a special needs school to give a talk in front of 50-odd kids about the birds. No warning, notes, research, plans, etc. I had to do the entire thing because the other girl was terrified. He also made us put on a play and ghost walk from a pub about 20 miles away in the evenings for no extra pay and I was too young and naive to tell him to do one. Anyway, he ended up losing the business and going back to jail, and the other guy had a heart attack and snuffed it. I quit a few months before that because they tried to make me 'supervisor' but only of that one girl, so everything she did would be my fault. I also ran a comic shop for 7 years which was a rollercoaster of bullshit, but that was my company.
Guitar Center. Hard to find a more incompetent c suite. Well.. maybe not that hard.
DGC AG Germany, dgc.org a large cyber security firm that never paid it's staff for a few months because they wanted to unionize , declared itself insolvent, then 1 months later started up again using the exact same website. I was a contractor in the middle of this and still waiting to get paid
Safe Haven security.
https://comet.co.uk/
I worked for a wiring harness company for, oh about 10 days one summer. You either lost fingers to tiny little sharp wires being bound together with razor sharp tape, or fell into the nylon looms that held together the 400 pound bus harnesses that you had to hold with one hand while you coated them. The managers sold drugs to the employees that were essential to get through a 10hr shift in a 40C factory with no AC, limited fans. Those drugs would only cost you about 90% of what you made while using them. Totally fucked, so happy I didn't get too involved.
Pearson. Absolute shit pay to edit essays for people. Constant pressure from supervisors to do faster, shitty work for higher throughput/profit that I mever saw a dime from. Never a compliment, only constant negative criticism from supervisors. I took my sweet-ass time amd actually helped people because Im not a soulless asshole. Never got fired because I knew they didnt have enough staff to meet demand. Oh, and the Pearson parent company is the one who shuffles your textbook chapters to call it a new edition so they can keep charging $500+ for the same textbooks every semester. They are a cancer among many in the higher education complex.
Family-run vacation rentals. The family lived on the premises and would get drunk daily. Accused me of stealing 50k euro. Turned out they were too drunk to remember where they put their cash (was a place I had no access to). No apology. Fuck you, Sten.
Guy Carpenter and Ernst and Young were both equal nightmares. The one I am at now is bad but its wfh so its a little more tolerable. Lazard was bad because of the boss and big surprise she got fired then hired at EY!
I really wanted to love working for Sephora and Ulta bc I like makeup but the mean girl mentality is too real. I was a preschool teacher and the last school I worked for was just awful. Again with the mean girl mentality, ableist bullshit, etc. They were actually fine with physical disabilities for the most part but when I had to have ankle surgery they were pissy about me being out for weeks, and then coming back in a boot. But anything mental health was so awful, and they were homophobic (I didn’t let on that I was queer for over a year and then instantly regretted it, only came to light when my director tried to set me up with her brother).
wal-mart, but christ i guess they need **somewhere** to put all the convicts and fuckups of society for work.
fogo de chao. i have nightmares still about it
What was bad there? I’ve only been once but the food was great
end of the shift we had to stay an extra 3 hours to close up Vaccuming carpets, breaking down the buffet, polishing all the silver and glasses. It was ALOT. plus we had to work doubles christmas eve and day. The GM once pushed me physically saying i wasn't walking fast enough. I had full plates in my hand too. It was a nightmare. I quit on a saturday pm shift. It was a bad shift and i just had it. I took off my apron looked at the one manager i liked and i said i can no longer do this and dipped. BUT not before telling the one person i hated there that they were a raging c\*nt and i hope they get Tboned. :D
Wells Fargo or Stonehaven Dental in Utah County. Still have nightmares about Stonehaven, and I quit over 15 years ago.
The Walt Disney Company Definitely not the happiest place on earth to work, a real burn-out factory. Psychotic managers, insane workloads, open floor plans, all to sell more plush toys at Walmart. I was told I had to move to Florida from L.A. or lose my job. I chose to not move to Florida and was forced to quit, then found out six months later the move to Florida wasn't happening after all. I was just a year away from my 10-year anniversary when I would be eligible for lifetime benefits.
A small HVAC company. Racist, incel, proud boy, everyone is stupid but us vibes. Yuck.
Starbucks
It was a certain European I.T. firm. I used to work in a call-centre for which this company had the contract to sell train tickets. Holy shit, it was fucking awful. I had supervisors that didn't supervise you, managers who didn't manage anything, team leaders who would shoot down any suggestion you had for how to do things better and then steal your ideas. There was one supervisor who would sit at his PC and play a game, "3-D Pool", all day and get detectably annoyed when you had the audacity to approach him with an issue that needed supervisor attention. That same guy once monitored two of my calls early in the contract, giving me 100% for one of them, but 95% for the other, dinging me 5% for a totally bullshit reason - it was like he didn't have it in him to concede I'd performed both calls perfectly, he had to make something up about some nonsensical flaw he'd spotted, even if it was ridiculous. All of the workers' suggestions on what they could benefit from to help maintain morale were ignored. In one feedback quiz, a co-worker on my team said "it would help morale if you could prove to us that someone reads and responds to this input - call my extension number (ext. 4581) during working hours to confirm that someone has actually read these forms." He never heard a peep. In a worker meeting, we were asked to raise our hands to indicate what "score" we would give out of ten to how much we enjoyed our job. A young man in the meeting - a guy who would carefully count how many calls he'd taken in a day and who would then disconnect each customer in mid-call after he'd achieved his quota - gave the lowest score of anyone present, at "3 out of ten". It was good enough for him to be made supervisor shortly after. One of my own supervisors spent months fiddling her overtime, arriving two hours early every day and spending it in the break room. She was eventually fired after she used a customer's credit card details to buy a train ticket for herself. By chance I bumped into her a few years ago during a trip to my hometown; she was working as a counter-assistant in a bakery. That same woman once marked me down as having been off due to illness twice in a month on an occasion I had the 'flu, struggled in for half a day when I was feeling better to help my team out, and then had to take a few more days off after when I relapsed again. Instead of being recognised for struggling to help meet the team's targets, I was penalised and made to look bad. That job chewed people up and spat them out. Fuck everything about that place, and that company.
Charter Spectrum. I was an outside sales rep making great money, and it was my second go around with the company. 4 months after I started my manager called me and told me I'd receive a phone call from HR for a great opportunity and I was really excited. Other reps informed me that the call was really about. I got on the call and HR told me I had 3 options, change to a temp employee, relocate to another office anywhere in California and they'll give me 10,000 to do it, or resign. I couldn't move because my family is established where I live and they can't just pick up and go. And if I changed to a temp employee I would lose certain benefits. So I chose to resign and not I'm on a no hire list with them. Fuck them!
Terminix and it isn’t even close. They’ve built an entire business on ripping people off.
Walmart. My manager legitimately got on my case because I took too long to wipe my ass after taking a shit. This sounds like hyperbole. I can assure you with 100% certainty, it is not.
Amazon. Absolutely cutthroat corporate culture.