When I graduated, I was desperate for a job. It's an expensive city where it's hard to find employment and I didn't want to end up moving back to my hometown. Of all the resumes I sent out--all with glowing references--Starbucks was the only one I heard back from. I did and said what I had to in order to get through the interview and I was hired, and immensely relieved just to have a job.
I should've looked harder for something else.
In the going-on fourth month I've worked for them, I have never been more miserable in my life. The baristas are gossips who stick to their cliques and make no attempt at socializing, but whine about me not being sociable enough. The hours I've worked have been killing me; apparently, I can actually physically not handle opening, but I'm afraid of switching the shifts because that's the position they wanted me for. I also live in the worst possible part of my city, and have to walk through it early in the morning and mingle with the crazies, and because the ten-cents-above-minimum-wage I earn BARELY covers my rent and hardly nutritious poor-person diet, I can't afford any other means of getting there.
I've also been hilariously scapegoated since working. It's pretty amazing how I've managed to do this and that so terribly wrong...on days where I wasn't even working. But apparently "was not physically there" isn't a good excuse. Not to mention the fact I wasn't shown how to do half the job, but all the other baristas get annoyed whenever I ask how I'm supposed to do something. Guys, the mind-numbingly sterile training videos covered like, three things. I don't even want to get into the complete lack of sympathy for being a little out of it at work, following a weekend of violent illness and a death in the family.
I'm the kind of person who figures "it's me, not you" about everything, and was down on myself about this job...but, when I googled their sick policy, expecting to end up on their official site, I wound up here instead and discovered I wasn't alone...and darker secrets of the company that so earnestly tries to get me on its side.
Refer to me as a "partner" no longer; the only thing I'm getting out of this is free drinks, and I have a higher-paying, less stressful and way more fulfilling job lined up.
Starbucks pays way too little for the work they expect you to do, in cities where minimum wage just isn't an option. I feel like I've wasted the past few months of my life, when I could have been pursuing a far better job more befitting my "real" profession.