Good Lord, We Hope They Were Paid Well

During the 2008 recession, I wound up employed at a scrubs store in a local mall, and I spent nine months in what I can only call a comedy of errors, some of which are mine, in that I stayed for way too long and tried to make the best of it.

1) My hiring manager quit under accusations of theft. Two more were promoted to manager and quit within days of one another, also accused of theft. This affected me in that the manager who hired me quit before I showed up for my first day of work, and I was not in the system to be paid. Getting me into the system was its own mess.

2) We were down to a total of four staff members with no management and no clue what to do other than open every day, make deposits, and open the tills. (I was trained on the fly by the most experienced coworker on how to handle this.)

3) We four came together, worked out our availability, and by some miracle, got every shift and break covered.

4) Inventory? What inventory? We didn’t know how to scan stuff in, so boxes of shipment were simply opened and put on the floor. Remember: we had nine months of this, including fall, winter/Christmas, and spring sets arriving and not being logged upon arrival because we didn’t know how.

5) When the lights started burning out, we had no way to replace them. The store was very dark by the time some sort of area manager deigned to show up.

6) We had no contact information to call said area manager, and though she promised to leave her number, she never did. She essentially gave us a ladder and long, skinny halogen light bulbs and told us to climb up and change them ourselves.

7) The area manager showed up one day with a fifth employee to help keep us running, got her into the system, and left again. We tried training her and working her in. She proceeded to steal money from the tills — every day — to pay for her lunch until the area manager fired her again.

8) At one point during her employment, our resident thief came to work sick. I worked with her for a full eight-hour day before she admitted she had tested positive for tuberculosis. I was exposed, but my body managed to fight it off without my lungs breaking out.

9) For reasons that boiled down to us being way too honest and loyal for our own good, none of the rest of the four of us stole or did the company dirty for the entirety of the nine months. We could have simply shut the shop down and let the company eat a $1,000 fine per day for not being open until they paid attention, but instead, we did what little we could and tried (a futile endeavor) to get the company or the area manager to do something to fix our situation.

10) Our harshest lesson came when the area manager finally got us a new manager. As soon as the new manager got their feet under them, they proceeded to force us out. A new staff was hired, and the four of us were given four hours per week and told that if we wanted more hours, we would have to “work harder to earn the privilege of getting more hours” and that we were going to have to actively compete with the new employees. (It may also be pertinent to know that the manager and all of their new hires were nepotism hires.)

I learned a lot of bitter lessons from that job.