December 16, 2013 - eldiablorobotiko
Hate after 1 week.
1 week. That’s all it took for me to utterly despise my job at target(i refuse to capitalize it). Now, I’ve been working retail for many years and aside from some general annoyances, I’ve enjoyed it. 3 months ago I was hired as a Starbucks Barista. Let the venting commence in no particular order.
Training:
I had no previous barista experience so I made it clear that I would only take the position if I was adequately trained which they assured me I would be. Well… that training consisted of 4 days before I was considered “certified”. To be fair, I wasn’t expected to know how to do everything after my “certification”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even a week, before I was left to work alone while others were on a break/lunch or the manager was doing the load or schedule. I won’t even talk about the non-existent cashier training…
Management:
I don’t think their management or leadership tiers could be any more complicated. 3 months and I still couldn’t figure out who does what (or if some of them do anything at all)… What a funny sight it was to see gstls, lods and etls standing by the registers trying to figure out who to call up to cashier when the best option would be for some of them to hop on. Do they realize how stupid they look standing there doing nothing in plain sight of customers?
Targets (only capitalized because it’s the beginning of a sentence) self-empowerment ideology seems to just be a ploy to make managements job easier. Managers seem to get pissed at being called over for anything even if it’s something you can’t do without. Like change.
Oh, man… You better hope you don’t run out change. During one of my few cashier shifts, I was running out of 5’s and the “get change” thingy wasn’t working. I saw the gstl or lod walk by and told him that I only had 2 fives left. His response to me was, “You’ll be fine”. Soon after I just shut my light off and walked over to him. He was doing nothing other than chatting with other employees in photo. Instead of getting me change he just told me to use another register…
It’s even worse in Starbucks. They really couldn’t care less about that part of the store. There were times when they forgot to put any money at all in the till. We would routinely run out of change and when we requested it no one would show up.. The “get gstl” option never works so the only way to get their attention would be to constantly press the “additional assistance” button. That would really piss them off since it sends a message to every walkie in the store.
Scheduling:
Week after week the Starbucks would have more people scheduled on slow days but less on busy days. Why would you schedule more employees on a slow Thursday then on a busy Friday?
Communication:
There is none. Especially in Starbucks. Again, management doesn’t give a crap about the department. A good example of this would be a time when an employee called out sick. A good hour and a half went by with us wondering if this person was gonna show up or not. It wasn’t until we sent someone to talk to an lod when we found out that the person called out 3 hours prior. They just didn’t bother telling us…
The Starbucks at the store I worked at had an “if you see something that needs to be done, do it” mentality. I can’t count how many times I was taking drink orders only to turn around and realize I was by myself because someone went to the back to get something or wash something without communicating a damn thing.
Ultimately it was this lack of communication that led to me quitting not even an hour into my shift on a busy Saturday morning. I was the opener at 7:30am. My 8 o’clock was a no show (maybe they called in and I just wasn’t told). To managements credit they did send over a floater to try and help me out. Unfortunately it was too little too late. Also, apparently the espresso machine was having problems the day before (I was off that day) so a tech showed up to fix it. No note was left forewarning me of this. He just shows up and shuts the machine down while I have a line of customers and does his thing. Customers are pissed off because they can’t get their coffee and start yelling at me for not putting a sign up notifying them of this. I started out apologetic but realized that I didn’t care anymore. I made them well aware of this by saying out loud, “F**k this s**t”. I left the register, walked into the back,
took off my apron, hat and name tag, tossed it into the sink filled with sanitizer and walked out.
Oops… I forgot to mention the red cards!
Nah, screw that. I won’t even go there.


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