Dear My Crappy Starbucks, UK:
In the past few weeks you have:
- cut everybody's hours to below their contracted hours, to meet the new 'labor budgets' (while saying the motivation was not financial, but about a budget of hours...)
- kept the floor constantly understaffed
- changed everyone's shifts to minimize breaks (ie. 3.5 hours instead of 4, so you don't get your 10 min, or 5.5 hrs instead of 6 to prevent lunches).
- changed the pay to monthly instead of bi-weekly, completely screwing over all of your practically minimum wage employees who barely make it paycheck to paycheck as it is. As a bonus you are also delaying them a weeks pay until the new pay period.
- demanded everybody start using the 'American' system of calling customers by their names, which many customers here in the UK dislike, while demanding we wear name tags, not permitting alternative names, so that the creepy weirdos that follow us home can now know them as well.
- asked me to come to mandatory meetings on MY time at least on a monthly basis. This is practically a fast food job! meetings? whenever we go they are totally pointless... lol
- told me that I could not wear a necklace that is sacred to me, even though it's under my shirt and can not be seen. (last I checked, what's under my shirt is my business). Forced me to dye my hair to keep my job, while also denying opportunities to change my hair and nails to my personal preferences.
- asked for endless new sacrifices and efforts from me re: new higher drink quality, new higher service quality, etc... and decided that negative re-enforcement is the best way to ensure them
- given me disciplinary hearings because I was upset about the new policies. Told me the Guardian, the Independent, and various other VERY CREDIBLE news sources were only saying what "starbucks told them to" when they boasted about record profits the other month. And that our store, despite record numbers, was also doing poorly. Tried to explain this by saying I was simply too ignorant to understand business.
TOO IGNORANT???!!! Look dickheads, it doesn't take a genius to know that record profits are record profits. Just because some idiot can't squander them fast enough does not mean we are doing poorly. And when our store's business is booming, that generally means the store is not doing poorly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure these things out, but boy what kind of idiot would it take to fall for your ridiculous claims? Has it ever occurred to you morons that constant market growth is utterly unsustainable? And that perhaps the ridiculous, ever growing fees and royalties Starbucks is charging our store might be increasingly unreasonable? No, of course not. It must be your employees, and the store itself doing poorly.... Yea. That's it.
- tried to convince me that starbucks UK in general is doing horribly, when we are opening 1,500 new franchises in in nearby coming weeks...and the aforementioned record profits are nationwide....
-announced a new plan of hiring 'apprentice' high school students for half of legal adult minimum wages.
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and tried to tell me this was good for me and my job, while disciplining me for lower morale and standing up for myself
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YOU WANT BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE? YOU WANT BETTER DRINK QUALITY? TRY NOT TREATING YOUR EMPLOYEES LIKE PIECES OF DISPENSABLE ****, and maybe they'd be willing to oblige. But don't act surprised when your underage, underpaid teenage replacements can't give the same service as their former fully paid, well experienced, and better treated counterparts used to.
GO **** YOURSELVES YOU CORPORATE PIGS, AND KEEP ON DEVOURING YOURSELVES OUT OF GREED. HOPEFULLY YOU'LL BE FULLY CANNIBALIZED SOON!
I'M OUT ASAP, AND F * C K Y O U , Y O U A R E P A T H E T I C G R E E D Y M O R O N S:-)