Wow. When people say "get a real job"....this is what we are supposed to deal with? I just found this article it's older but I know people who dealt with the same shit in retail.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...ours.html?_r=0
Wow. When people say "get a real job"....this is what we are supposed to deal with? I just found this article it's older but I know people who dealt with the same shit in retail.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...ours.html?_r=0
Yep, I had a shitty minimum wage job like that. I was usually scheduled 3-4 days a week, but often ended up working 6 to cover for other people last minute. Then, when I was just finally stabilizing with the extra money, they would suddenly yank my hours to 1-2 days a week to "even it out" so that I wasn't officially clocking an average of more than 30 a week because otherwise they'd have to give me benefits. They once scheduled me for 4 days and then, right before the week started, slashed me to 2 short swing shifts without even saying a word.... They'd also change the schedule on days I wasn't there, not call me, and then be up my ass when I didn't show up the next day on time... I'm like what? You didn't tell me! Am I just supposed to call every day and ask if the schedule has been changed without my knowledge? Such bullshit.
I was never able to plan for my own time because chances are I would be called in last minute, the money wasn't stable enough for me to be on top of my bills so I was continually going into debt, but the schedule wasn't consistent enough for me to try to get a second job around it. They trained me for a promotion and then took it away for ridiculous reasons 3 times, and then would promote people who had only been there 3 weeks and put me on shifts with them because they had no idea how to do the extra work, but I did, because I'd been trained... but not promoted to their position....
I can't even imagine trying to do all that with a kid and no car. That's just miserable. As soon as I broke up with my bf and started escorting -- immediately after my first appointment, I put in my notice and never looked back. I could never go back to a place like that now. They're terrible companies to work for.
Don't try to win over the haters. You are not the Jerk Whisperer.
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.


Ugh. I cant imagine doing all of that with a kid. I can with no car, though. Where I grew up, I took an hour long bus ride to the city to get to work, and often was left waiting around for hours for work to start because of the bus schedule... no other choice. A 4 hour work shift could take me 9 hours of being out of the house. :/ What a pain...
This is how I feel when I'm have a SHIT week in the club:
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comic by: Matt Fraction/Chip Zdarsky.
FUCK MINIMUM WAGE. I may not be making that much more than when I worked in the pharmacy, but I'm happier. Now I can be poor because I'm working 1 or 2 days/ 16 hours a week (vs 5 days/38 hours) and I get to spend time with my family.




Fuck Starbucks! and fuck all companies that treat their employees badly like that. That is bullshit! I don't drink coffee but even if I did I would never give them business just because of how they treat their employees. I try not to give business to any companies like that, such as Walmart. How can they be so inconsiderate and have such unreasonable expectations of their workers? Scheduling that girl to work until 11 pm and then again at 4 am the next morning...that is just cruel! If that's not selling your soul, then I don't know what is. At least in the sex industry you have more freedom and get to choose when and how you want to work.




Thanks, jasmine22, for posting this interesting and insightful link. Which makes so-called "benefits" in lieu of adequate compensation or a tenable schedule to take advantage of benefits an endless loop of "Catch 22." What good does it do to offer tuition for advanced degree if one cannot effectively plan to make class?
For another perspective, go to Yahoo! Finance, and look up symbol SBUX. Then click "insider transactions." Note that within the last 30 days, one of the directors sold ~119,000 shares for $6M. Given the exercise price of his options of $4.32- $15.21 per share, that is at least ~ $4.2M pure profit. (Try typing in http//finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=SBUX+Insider+Transactions )
This puts a 21st century spin on indentured servitude.
I'm right 96% of the time.I don't sweat
the other 5% .......................





MANY MEN WANTED TO LAY ME DOWN, BUT FEW WANTED TO LIFT ME UP
-Eartha Kitt




I thought Starbucks was named one of the best employers! At least that's what they claim with the sign in the door.





Isn't it amazing what paid PR can do !!!
Starbucks claims to offer a starting hourly pay rate which is well above minimum wage / competitor's job offerings. This is in fact true ... but ... it comes with the unpublished financial reality that the extra hourly wages are being financed by cuts in de-facto benefits by limiting workers to 28 hours or less per week, plus cutting overall staff levels to the point where any employee no-show precipitates a call-in to cover.
Starbucks claims to offer an impressive benefits package to its workers. This is also in fact true ... but ... it comes with the unpublished financial reality that those 28 hour or less per week part time workers don't qualify for all of Starbucks' employee benefits. Nor will their scheduled working hours plus call-in requirements allow them to take full advantage of the highly touted educational benefits.
As is increasingly the case, one can no longer take 'headlines' at face value !!! To get a true picture, it's necessary to 'look under the hood' and discover what's really happening !!! The true picture seems to be that a tiny minority of 'full time' Starbucks employees do in fact enjoy 'one of the best employers' - as stated 'loudly' in mainstream media ... while the majority of 'part time' Starbucks employees do not ( and in fact face worse working conditions than before ).
But the vast majority of Starbucks customers never bother to look 'under the hood' ... and assume that part of the money they are spending on overpriced coffees is being used to fund 'living wage' paychecks and college tuition for Starbucks employees ( versus mostly being used to fund stock buybacks which created huge profits for company management and stockholders ).
Last edited by Melonie; 05-24-2015 at 05:40 AM.





Now now, we can't be angry just at Starbucks. MOST vanilla jobs that are hourly food or customer service are like this. I'm definitely not trying to say it's okay, but it does 'come with the territory'. Between my other half and I, we've worked probably 15 such jobs and they're all the same. They put out the Monday-start schedules the Friday 3 days before... if you requested a day off, you never know until then if it was approved. The "clopening" thing is really common, though it's not as extreme in restaurants to leave at midnight and be back at 10:30. He routinely gets put on a 10-12 hour double shift with no lunch break. It's inconvenient and it sucks, but it's unfortunately normal and we can't hang just one corporation out to dry for it.
It's not entirely the fault of a computer algorithm (which I think humans sometimes forget we can override; I'm sure they could program it to not make people "clopen") or the corporation (though it is absurd that they make billions of $$ and can't swallow letting someone finish their 4 hour shift instead of sending them home to save an hour of $8 labor). Usually this kind of BS is manager-specific. I have several friends who LOVED working at Starbucks, but they had good managers. This girl sounds like her manager doesn't give two shits, she's probably just an expendable employee to them. There's also the frequent scenario of the employee who most obviously NEEDS that job getting abused, because the manager knows she'll take it rather than quit. It's fucked up. I'm wondering if she can't possibly appeal to a regional manager.
"People jack off with the left hand and point with the right."
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
yeah society thinks sex work is "so degrading" but nothing made me feel more degraded than working a shitty fast food job. Horrible pay and customers treat you like dirt on the bottom of their shoe. I think (or at least I hope) people are wising up that the old paradigm of "working your way up" or "getting a good job with benefits" is no longer a thing. I'm teaching my kids to work for themselves. Seriously $400 every 2 weeks?? I easily make that in a week just selling crap on ebay part time..AND I stay at home with my baby while I do it. People need to adapt because technology is soon going to replace these jobs anyway.





Haha, I've worked for Starbucks before. Man, do I have some horror stories. I only got paid $7.40/hour, and I had to work constantly. It was back-breaking work. The manager was a complete asshat. He made me scrub the concrete OUTSIDE. Who does that? I had to clean dirty toilets and scrub trash cans. Sweating my ass off for peasant pay.
The final straw was when I had to work xmas day. The busiest day of the year. I barely had time to breathe, it was a constant line of customers out the door, NONSTOP, until closing time. We closed up at midnight, and went home. But then I had to be there again the next morning at 4AM! NO JOKE! I didn't even get 2 hours of sleep. I showed up, miraculously, on time at 4AM. But I quit that day as soon as my shift was over. It's true what they say about starbucks scheduling. It's grueling.
Last edited by ScarletKitten; 06-08-2015 at 03:55 PM.
"Dancing tables, making deals with devils like a drunk beauty queen"




^^It's like they expect their employees to be inhuman or something. There needs to be a rule against this type of scheduling if there isnt already.
Wow, of all companies I really thought Starbucks was one of the better ones. Well, there is still Winco Foods: http://time.com/4701/walmarts-worst-nightmare/
It is truly employee owned and some employees end up millionaires because of their stock values. Walmart's worst nightmare too because they can offer rock bottom prices and keep employees happy.
"There are different kinds of darkness. There is darkness that frightens, the darkness that soothes, the darkness that is restful. There is the darkness of lovers, and the darkness of assassins. It becomes what the bearer wishes it to be, needs it to be. It is not wholly bad or good."
- The Court of Mist and Fury





Yup, Winco Foods has a pretty solid business model. One of their major cost-saving measures is employing their own non-union truck drivers ... at low pay rates versus unionized truckers ( which has drawn the ire of the Teamsters ). Another major cost-saving measure is effectively 'paying' a portion of worker paychecks and retirement benefits in 'script' i.e. non publicly traded company stock shares ... which has indeed created a few 'paper' millionaires ( but only if the company itself is willing to buy out those non publicly traded company stock shares for real cash ).Well, there is still Winco Foods:
It is truly employee owned and some employees end up millionaires because of their stock values. Walmart's worst nightmare too because they can offer rock bottom prices and keep employees happy.
In the interest of 'equal time', there is a big difference between a publicly traded company 'paying' a portion of worker salaries and retirement benefits with easily tradable company stock shares with many open market buyers and an established market value, versus a privately held company 'paying' a portion of worker salaries and retirement benefits in 'script' which ( for the moment at least ) has zero resale value to anyone except the privately held company's treasury / management. The private company's management is also free to deploy the value of said employee owned 'script' to invest in additional stores etc. without risk of objections from employee 'shareholders'.
Last edited by Melonie; 05-26-2015 at 03:51 AM.










... no more ominous than FedEx versus UPS delivery drivers, or Uber versus Taxi Company drivers. SeeThat sounds Ominous right there^









As a former manager responsible for scheduling in a large retail chain store, I can say that I really don't believe that this is a case of "those evil managers just abuse their employees because they don't care."
Consider that this is the BS we had to put up with:
1. The program we had to use for scheduling basically told us how many employees we had to have each day, by the hour, based on company sales forecasts, and we HAD to follow it. These numbers were constantly changing, and it wasn't just so simple to override the system. Now, add in the fact that most employees are not supposed to exceed x number of hours per week, in order to avoid paying them benefits (the company's policy - not under a manager's control.) Then, schedule the employees who do not have 24/7 availability, since they have to be placed into the schedule whenever they CAN work. (For this reason, companies are much more likely to hire applicants who indicate that they have open availability. So, many applicants are pretty much aware that they have to put that on their application in order to have the best chance of getting the job, even if not all hours are convenient for them. Then, of course, you are expected to be able to adhere to whatever you wrote down.) Finally, you have scheduled around the employees who have limited availability, and you are faced with the task of using the remaining employees to fill whatever time slots are left. Keep in mind that you DO have to fill up all the empty slots, because if you don't use the entire staffing budget, corporate will assume that you don't need it all, and cut the budget for the following year (meaning even fewer hours to give out to employees.) This inevitably leads to some unfortunate employees getting stuck with less than convenient or desirable schedules, unless the manager happens to be some kind of scheduling genius (which he/she probably isn't......otherwise he/she would be working in a better job, not managing in retail...)
2. Oh, and I would HATE it when the employees would just assume that the managers make sooo much money. Yeah, we're on salary, so we're guaranteed the same amount of $$ each paycheck.....and that's about the only extra perk we have. No one seems to notice that we actually have to work a gazillion hours a week to get that paycheck in the first place, so if you were to break it down into an hourly rate, we are probably making equal to or less than the hourly rate that our employees get paid. And we still have to deal with the same BS of not knowing our schedule in advance. Even if we did know it though, it wouldn't make much of a difference, because guess who always has to stay late when a deadline needs to be met or some unexpected problem pops up? Yep...





DreamsInDigital, it may be that way in some jobs. I'm going off numerous people who worked for Sbux and were very happy. That is what leads me to think it may be the manager.
Plus, you have to look at it from the managerial point of view. I'm sure I'll get called a callous bitch, but when I'm managing a business and have an employee who is consistently late, has issues finding childcare, etc., it becomes a giant pain in my ass. Those were the first people to get axed. At my family's business, we gave those people a chance but they all proved unreliable (even if it was no fault of their own), and eventually got to the point that people who did not have cars were immediately disqualified.
"People jack off with the left hand and point with the right."
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."




I'm working my ass off as a realtor right now and dancing when I've got a few hours to spare in my evenings to pay the bills until my new career becomes more lucrative.
I always figured that I must have been lazy because my 9-5 job (that was more like 7am-7pm most days) was leaving me with no time for anything but work.
Now I start work at 7am and am usually engaged in some kind of income generating activity (whether dancing or Real Estate sales) until midnight most nights. Strangely, I feel like I have a lot more time available and I get a lot more accomplished.
It doesn't matter if you are riding a desk or working the counter at a fast food place, if you don't have control over your schedule, you don't have control over you life.





This reminds me when I worked at Venture (a defunct retail chain like Wal-Mart) in 1991. I didn't have a kid but was in college full time and they'd give me a hard time about working around it. They had this bullshit policy called will call where you had to call an hour or two before work. This was an inconvenience because what if you had to take the bus or go to school or something else? They would give you a hard time if you asked for a day off and often scheduled a closing then an opening the next day. I also didn't want many hours and they kept giving me more and more. I finally had enough and quit when they wrote me up for a day I asked off. I asked them a month early, they refused to allow me off, I got a coworker to take my shift, she ended up in the hospital and unable to work. She got fired, I got written up and walked out. Months later I got a job as a nude model, and six months later a stripper. My coworker did too.
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