You've probably heard about the crazy horror stories of several industries. Everyday, employees are listing out major red flags from their places of work — without exposing the companies directly involved of course. We took it a step further to look out for SOME of the worst-rated companies you’d ever work for. Watch out! Because most of them are unexpected.
My mom worked for SA for like 10 years.
The horror she experienced was worth quitting. The store manager took advantage of her and every other employee there by taking the valuable donations before they could hit the floor, making people work alone from open to close, and threatening people to participate in the yearly Christmas silent auction even though she always outbid everyone and also kept the money from other's bids. I'm pretty sure that woman was stealing from the tills as well. I hated her smug face so much as a kid. My mom finally quit after 10 years and not a single raise and the other 4 employees quit with her, leaving the manager to deal with the fallout. DornishFox
I once heard from another Dollar Tree Store that a worker took a sip of water she was in line to buy before the purchase went through. Management saw this over the cameras and fired her on the spot. It was well known that the cameras weren't for the customers but the staff. Another reason they suck, I worked there for over a year and in that time they gave me a 15-cent raise at the six-month mark. I asked for another 15-cent raise after a year. They didn’t even have the decency to tell me no because guess what?
They just never responded. If you're wondering what my pay was 7.50 then 7.65. 15-minute breaks and lunches were unpaid. My friend ended up becoming one of the assistant managers and her pay was 8.50. The store manager would often come in at 3:00 am to help the stockers and leave around 3:30 pm, 6 to 7 days a week. I could keep going Juliebear144
Amazon, the reason for this is way too infuriating that I thought I must tell. We had 2 Separate Homicides in our building and it still took 5 months to get Metal Detectors going in; they only had them up until that point going out. Safety first! You cannot wear headphones or go to the bathroom when you want but you can Bang Meth or Dope in the parking lot and just leave the needle there no one seems to mind.
I’ve heard multiple stories of suicides and heart attacks but you’ll never read about them. ChickenFrancese
I worked for Whole Foods in Madison WI for the last 2.5 years. Finally quit without notice last month when, after giving my TL an entire month's notice he refused to speak to me and was actively trying to find my replacement behind my back. I came in one day and decided I wasn’t going to give them another minute of my time. I took care of the cash office duties that morning, emailed store leadership, and I walked out. In the winters they would make somebody stand outside in negative degree weather to make sure carts were cleaned and people were masking up. The red flags were too crazy to handle. The sanitizer would freeze upon contact, but they expected us to stand there and put on a happy face. Leadership even went so far as to dress code people that were standing out in the cold if the hat they were wearing to stay warm was NOT a Whole Foods hat. When leadership was asked why we had people outside of the store and not at least in the lobby to keep warm we were told that they wanted to be able to sell items in the foyer instead.
We had a supervisor sleep her way up to the ATL position, and when this was repeatedly brought up to leadership we were told not to add fuel to the fire. One time a team member was waiting for results to come back from a COVID test and wasn’t sure he should come to work. He was told by leadership to come in. Leadership did nothing as far as contact tracing and making sure they informed people that were in contact with them that resulted in transferring the virus. Last Thanksgiving we were at probably double our capacity. One supervisor took it upon himself to start limiting how many people were coming into the store, which made all team members feel a little bit better at least. Our STL found out and told him he was not to limit anybody at the door, and that we haven’t reached our legal capacity yet. bor_esor
I'm a former Starbucks employee. They will bend over backward to let customers abuse you. They will never schedule enough people or give proper training or a decent number of weekly hours (either feast or famine, never what you need that week) or reasonable schedule ever. And guess what? They will literally abuse their power as your employer. They would ask you to climb ladders to clean vents and stock heavy boxes in precarious places, clean bathrooms with feces everywhere, and have unreasonable drive-through times, especially considering the lack of enough staff, ridiculous customer requests, and endless mobile orders that must somehow still be done in the same time requirements.
Demanding you follow corporate standards while also making the moment right, pressure to work even when sick, attempts to make you find your own replacement when sick, and so much wage theft with missed breaks and forcing you to spend the entire freaking break waiting in line with customers for the only drink you're allowed in four to six hours because water isn't allowed behind the counter. Plus all the petty tyrants of middle managers and playing favorites and blah blah of all jobs. And screw that sarcastic bullcrap of "being promoted to the customer". Best promotion I ever gave myself. constantchaosclay
Never send your senior citizen to a Revera care home unless you want to be part of a class-action lawsuit over their criminally negligent "care" of your loved one because based on my experience? It can lead to the worst ending. It can result in serious injury or death. They tried to make me come to work when I was sick with a GI virus which would have endangered my residents.
I grieved it and was bullied so badly that I lost 30 lbs in a month from the stress. Surprise surprise! The current class-action lawsuit is over not following provincial covid protocols resulting in preventable deaths. Nomomommy
Target made record profits from the pandemic, and cut payroll hours to a lot of stores while the stores were busier. So you heard about them giving hundreds of dollars to all of its “valued employees,” but those employees were doing the work of three people for the pay of one. Five years ago, that employee would have been covering one department in the store, like furniture. Now, in a lot of stores, they’re covering an entire side of the store (so basically furniture/stationery/domestics/maybe more), and having to be the backup cashier because barely any cashiers are scheduled.
I want to mention that I met a lot of awesome people working at Target. When I quit, my problem was with corporate decisions. I liked the people at a store level, even the bosses. Delica
Dollar general exploits salaried managers and use them for slave labor. Regularly sending them here, there and everywhere to work in other stores for free under the guise of a salary position. And the only way the crew gets treated any better is if the SM fights for them. Sure they don't work for free, but with wages as low as they are and hours as short, they might as well! Corporate calls hourly associates "workhorses" and expects you to treat them like animals. They are also iffy about covid guidelines. Sure don't come to work if you test positive, but you can't have time off to get tested and you need to show up for your shift while you wait for your results.
Salaried managers are on call 24/7, have no sick time, and give up vacation time as expected. I was on a conference call every half hour from 4 pm-10 pm when I already worked 6 am-5 pm. You're left alone for hours in the store, just you and the customers. I've done the whole 16-hour shift by myself. And salaried managers are the ones they try to keep happy because they run the stores! It's just as bad, a lot of the time worse for hourly. Esoteric-female
I worked at a company called Copart. I was unfortunately diagnosed with HIV. Being young and naive, I went to HR thinking, “Hey, maybe there are programs or resources I don’t know about for employees with my condition.” Yeah, I know but what happened next caused my resignation. It turns out, that the HR director at the time wanted to send out a notice that an “anonymous employee is infected with HIV” and get this, they would have posted these notices in the bathroom. Now, Copart runs junk yards. They have them all over the world. But I didn’t work in a junkyard. I worked at a corporate HQ in an office job. I also worked at Deloitte.
They talk a big, impressive game about how well they treat their employees. Neglecting to tell you that because they receive this treatment, apparently that means all salary employees work around the clock with no limits as to when your supervisors can harass you about deadlines. Guess what? I was harassed by my direct supervisor and his gross sycophantic minion who had a nose like a freaking aardvark and a bleach job that would bring you to tears so badly I had a massive panic attack at work on Christmas Eve. Then I had a seizure a month later (with no history of ever having them) at the office. Fired a week later. Sorry. Been holding that in for years. supersecret7799
FedEx Express will have you working in literally any weather condition, around heavy equipment that could easily kill you, and until 4 am for around $14 an hour. -40°F outside? Working like a slave. 70mph wind? Still required to work. 120°F out?
Yep, still working. I’ve actually worked in all of these conditions so far and nearly gotten frostbite a few times. But hey, at least I got a 3% raise this year! ($0.43 btw) Isn’t that nice lol?? ZeOs-x-PUNCAKE
Trinity Products, MO has incredibly low wages for the job, severe lack of safety (one temp has two toes amputated due to being crushed between pipes, all they did after the OSHA inspection was place stickers on machinery) installed fake cleaning procedures to keep production going during Covid, mandatory OT, systemic racism (black folks are the entirety of the janitorial staff), profit sharing is routinely revoked for everyone due to minor infractions of a few, systemic pay discrepancies between employees with the exact same job description... The list goes on and on.
If you work as a production worker at Tesla or as a parts runner you are literally a modern-day slave. 12 hr shifts plus most of the workers come from over an hour away. People are literally sleeping AT work because it's pointless to go home, get 6 hrs of sleep, and come back. Some even brought their own RVs and Campers to sleep on their several parking lots so they wouldn't have to drive home. Wait, there’s more. They have adhesive that's stronger than a weld that they don't give workers the proper PPE to handle and it supposedly seeps into gloves and is toxic to the skin. They hardly ever properly sanitize the stations that use a lot of it too.
A worker had to have his stomach pumped because he accidentally got some on his face mask and was breathing it in for an undetermined amount of time. They also give all factory vehicles the right of way. Which I have never heard of in any other warehouse I've worked. Several workers have been injured by overworked and tired forklift drivers and have been denied workers' compensation. The ones who are permanently injured and actually won a case are sitting at home collecting checks from Tesla to this day. DaviiSenpai
I used to work as a GM for Chipotle. I have 20 years of management experience and I will say this. That company is the worst of the worst. I completed training in hell and transferred to another level of hell. It was just the worst. I had enough when I got called in at 5 am to set up for a store meeting at 7 am on my one day off and the DM didn't show up until 10 am. Then I had to stay for lunch due to people not showing up.
They make it easy to call off with crap policy. The next day I decided to end things. I showed up at 6 am, set up the drawers, and waited until a cashier showed up. I went next door, got a smoothie at Smoothie King, and went back. The KM showed up and I handed him the keys. Best choice I ever made. MostAnswer660
My old job Bob's Discount Furniture! What a mess that company is, no stock and they still wanted me to sell crap furniture that wasn't even going to come in for months. On top of that, they still have the audacity to take money away from us for not hitting our quotas because the draw against commission structure. That company promotes honesty, integrity, and all the BS but they don't care.
I left that crappy job in the middle of my shift. I made sure to do it when the Main Operations manager went to lunch to force her lazy self to work the sales floor. My resignation letter was literally, I quit on her desk and that's it. LARamos345
Disney blows to work for. They make college kids uproot their whole lives then will not hesitate to terminate them over hair color, mail length, etc. I have an example. I was an intern. At Disney, you get 3 “warnings” before you get terminated…no questions asked. Just done. Period. My internship was supposed to be 6 months long. Within the first month, I had two warnings and you’ll never believe the reasons. 1 for my hair being ombré, which I dyed a solid color but due to Florida sun it made a return. The other was for being conned by a guest into giving them a room key.
They presented false identification and me. A 20-year-old kid freshly off training believed him. I didn’t wait around to get my last warning. I uprooted my entire life for that place and the fact they can send anyone home in 1 day is repulsive. Also, if you stayed in Disney housing you could either stay in wet or dry housing. If you were in wet housing and you had someone come over that was not of legal drinking age but they lied and told you they were and they got caught, everyone in your apartment would be sent home the next day. Even if you weren’t home. Even if you had no idea what was happening. Unreal. Ex0ticButters
Working at Forever 21, we had to climb over a SEA (literally a mega pile of hundreds of boxes) of big boxes thrown together in the stockroom like a literal mountain, to stock products. Like terrible OSHA violations, the store would have been shut down immediately if they were to walk into the stock room. Just think about this for a second - Forever 21 does not have SKUs on any of their products. They make the visual merchandisers arrange the product by "theme" and "color story." It's freaking insanity and so incredibly unsafe. The store manager was also horribly abusive to everyone. This was a long time ago, I don't work in retail anymore. I make a good living, but as it is known, there are plenty of people in here making more than minimum wage who freaking hate their jobs with every fiber of their being. I am one of them.
I am a proletariat through and through. I stand for worker's rights always, because I am a worker that gets abused just the same. I just experienced a whole different kind of hell now. I do project management in commercial printing and it's a niche industry. Do you think retail is bad? Just wait until you can't sleep at night and anxiety is freaking eating you alive because you have so many projects on your plate with such insanely right deadlines for so many horribly demanding retail clients, that you just don't even know where to start. We're also destroying the Earth by printing next months garbage because all those window displays you see in every mall everywhere, they go right to the landfill, all those non-biodegradable foam and vinyl products, every freaking month when the next promotion to try to get you to buy crap you don't need rolls around) entourageffect
Walmart fired me after questioning me about co-workers kissing in my department on the clock…8 hours after I clocked out…when I was two states away. The crap store manager, Rob, brought me and my department manager in and kept asking… Rob - “Is there something you need to tell me?” Me - “I don't know man. Do you want to ask me a question?” Rob - “I think there is something you need to tell me.” Me - “Cool. Ask me a question and we can start from there.” Rob, the human equivalent of an enema - “I see you aren’t going to cooperate today or any other day.” Me - “You still haven’t asked a question." I look at my department manager, you see what’s going on here?” Then he dropped the bomb. Rob - “We are going to let you go for refusing to cooperate.” Me - “Oh yea? Sounds great.” They challenged my unemployment and lost thanks to the conversation recording I made on my phone. My state is a one-party recording state. They offered me my job back, with a raise, which I accepted under the conditions that Rob left me alone and did not retaliate again. They also had to give me 3 weeks of non-lapsing paid vacation and health benefits at the start of my re-employment effective immediately in addition to regularly accrued time.
No wait time. They agreed. And left me alone. I left 9 months after I restarted. Rob left before I re-started. I was virtually untouchable. I did not exploit that. I just wanted to get myself in order and start college. gomukgo
Best Buy sucks. I came from AT&T and was straight up lied to at my interview on how the sales compensation works and ended up with $800 paychecks…The abusive acts go on. No employees can sit down anymore and if you stand in one place too long they will grab you to dust or do some other crap. Plus they give employees insane goals to sell their crappy credit cards and will check on the progress daily with this ridiculous checklist. Their incentive program gives you an “awesome ticket” , a worthless piece of paper saying a good job.
In my short time at the Gurnee IL location, I’ve never felt like more of a kindergartner in my life. Curse you Delgato. Thecheat88
I worked at Thin Man Brewery briefly in Buffalo, NY; though this was a huge deal and a great stepping stone in my career as they are very well acclaimed and their craft beer even gets sold in bodegas in NYC. Started the day that Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd (4/19). I did let them know about several things that were red flags for me, but ultimately the last straw was that I had spent 5 1/2 hours straight training on sautéing on the heaviest day of my period and desperately needed a bathroom break before I started leaking. I had been given several warnings that I needed to go to the bathroom and it was an emergency.
One chef Jeff Ziolkowski then said, “if you step off this line, don’t come back.” So after a few moments of going back and forth, I just threw my gloves at him and told him I quit. The female GM was there too and apparently, we were too slammed for her to care. KitHelleborne
I worked at Home Freaking Depot. Without giving away too much information, our service desk supervisor left to go to another store. Upper management hadn't hired anyone to fill the position before the supervisor left, so they had me doing it, with it being strongly implied that when the applications were sorted, mine would be the one chosen. I busted my butt for them.
I ran that desk like the well-oiled machine it should have been all along. My co-workers were happy, management was happy, customers were happy, and then they pulled the rug out from under me by hiring an outsider. They then proceeded to rub salt in the wound by having me train my replacement and trying to hide from me that that was happening. NotARobotDefACyborg