No One Was Minding The Store!
“An assistant manager at a photography studio where I worked was in the studio alone. It was one of those mall studios. She got a call that her kid was sick and she needed to pick her up. So she left the studio without closing the doors or calling anyone else in. She left the cameras out and the computers were out for anyone to mess with or take. She left the cash in the register with her ID logged in so all anyone needed to do was hit the button that said ‘open drawer’ on it to get all the cash.
She left thousands and thousands of dollars worth of equipment open for anyone to take but because she got lucky and nobody stole anything she didn’t get fired.”
She Almost Left People Stranded
“I used to work at a ski resort as a lift operator. The protocol at the end of the day was to stop skiers from riding the chairlift, call the operator at the top and notify them the number of the last chair. In this instance, my female coworker called up the wrong number, and in her hurry to finish packing up the area failed to notice another skier get on the chair.
Fortunately, the operator at the top felt a bit weird about the situation and snowboarded down under the chairs to find 4 people still on the chairlift after it had been shut down and turned off. This lead into a terrible situation late in the afternoon involving Lift Maintenance to get back up the mountain to start the lift, as the ‘drive station’ where the lift is started is at the top.
The chairlift, in particular, is roughly 30-40 feet high, with no great trees to jump to and the snow was not deep enough to jump down. The temperature also dropped to -20C/-4F that evening and the people would have certainly died.
She was not fired but I didn’t see her operate a chairlift again.”
The Guy Showed Up Hammered On Black Friday
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“I used to work at a store that specialized at selling video games but basically has since turned into a toy store.
Well like everywhere, Black Friday is a super busy day and this year was especially because we had some really good deals. The plan was to have three people working throughout the day so we don’t get overwhelmed by the number of customers. One of our supervisors, who I will call Tony, was supposed to be on the opening shift at 6 am but decided that it would be a great idea to go out drinking all night on Thanksgiving with his brother until 5 am.
Well, when Tony’s 6 am shift came around, he stumbled into work still completely hammered. As expected, the store was nonstop busy right from opening. To make matters worse, the 3rd person on that shift decided he would rather sleep in and go shopping instead of coming into work, so the shift was only being covered by our store manager and a totally wasted supervisor.
My shift was meant to be from 2 pm to closing but they begged me to come in early so they could send Tony home, and when I got there the store manager was telling me about it and how he tried to see if Tony could work hammered because there was no way he could run the store by himself.
The store manager told me that Tony would frequently just stare at the customer if they asked him a question, and got ‘lost’ in our tiny backroom looking for an Xbox. At one point, he fell asleep on the toilet for 10 minutes and later tried to sell multiple customers a ‘100-mile’ warranty for their games. He finally sent Tony home once he got the assistant manager to come in at 8 am.
Tony wasn’t fired.”
He Ripped Everyone Off
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“My manager should have been fired for royally effing over his entire staff over and I have no idea why he wasn’t.
So my manager at a retail cellular store was a sleazeball when it came to being a salesperson. You know the cartoon sales guy with the cheesy persona and can snake money out of you easily? Yeah, he was that guy.
He didn’t get a straight commission from every sale, he got a monthly commission from the store’s performance overall. Because of this, any of our customers that came in with a quote we had printed and with our business card, he would give that sale to that person.
One day his daughter’s friend (we will call her Ruth) started working there and was actually renting a room in his house. After a few months of incredibly low paychecks, we all started looking at the sales reports. Turns out all of our customers that came in to finalize a sale he would give to Ruth. They would then split her incredibly large commission checks. This went back for months, robbing all of us on thousands of dollars from our personal checks.
So if I spend 2 hours with a customer on plans, phones, accessories, and warranty info, and they bring their family in on my day off to pick out their phones and 5 new lines, it was a big deal – that all went to Ruth.
We plotted against him and reported suspicious activity and sales tampering to our district manager and the anonymous HR helpline. He was never fired, we were never compensated. He instead was transferred to a different store, but the other 6 of us found new jobs within that next month before he actually left.
As a father of a 5-year-old who had to donate plasma during those times of short checks, my blood boils just typing this.”
He Just Sprinkled Serious Medicine Anywhere He Wanted
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“Back in the day, I had a job as a Dispense Technician in a chain discount pharmacy. As I was a pharmacy student, I got a higher wage than the people that they hired out of high school. This is a double whammy so get ready.
The manager had an Excel spreadsheet to figure out wages, based off previous profits. I don’t remember the exact percentage but for example’s sake, he gave 13% of profits to wages. Well, the business was failing and head office discovered that he had his spreadsheet wrong and he issued 17% for wages for a whole year. The manager actually got fired.
Because of this, the new manager decided to cut back my expensive hours and use ‘juniors’ to fill in for me and then have me work at peak times when I could be better utilized. In Australia, we have a pill-scheduling system where medicine has to be in certain sections of the pharmacy. My job was to deal with the serious, prescription medicine that came in and issue it to the safe and add the volume/tablet count to a handbook. This became the job for a junior post wage-gate.
I came into work and found a man holding a bottle of codeine linctus. He asked me if it would fix his sore throat as it was in the place of another pharmacy brand cough mixture. I sneakily grabbed it, pushed him towards the correct medicine and had him on his way. I spent the next two hours tracking down the other prescription medicines on the shelf, putting them into the safe and updating the manager as to how messed up things were. This stuff is so serious here in Australia that the pharmacist on duty and the pharmacist in charge could have lost there license. The junior didn’t get fired by the way. And that is why you can’t put a price on knowledge and experience.”
She’s Just Plain Mean
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“I was an assistant manager at a store and had just come back from my father’s funeral, but needed to put food on the table, so I came back the day after his funeral. I had an employee who had always given me a really hard time, but I was told I wasn’t allowed to reprimand her by the store manager (I learned later that this wasn’t true by the district manager, but we’ll get to that).
I had been working at this store for over a year and had never asked for time off and only called in sick maybe once. I did what was asked when was asked to do it and did my best to be friendly. She had only been working there a month and was always late, had several customer complaints, her register was always off by five or ten dollars, and she rarely listened to me.
I come back, and the first thing she does when the store manager leaves is to turn around, pull her phone from her pocket, and start playing music. I told her to put it away, she knows that’s not allowed, and she goes, ‘What are you gonna do, send me home? Nobody else is here,’ and I said ‘Just turn the phone off. Its only been three minutes. You can go on your break and listen to it.’ She started arguing with me that no one else has ever told her she wasn’t allowed to listen, so I tried calling the manager, but her phone was conveniently off (this was a pattern with her).
I told the employee if she didn’t turn it off, I was gonna lock it in the security office and not give it back until she got off work. She threw a fit and grabbed the phone and took it outside and threw it in the ground so hard it shattered. She then started stomping on it, then came back inside and screamed, ‘Now I can’t call my son! He has cerebral palsy and NEEDS ME!’ and I replied,’You didn’t have to do ANY of that. It’s time for you to go home.’
She refused, and when I came back from the back, I came upon her telling a customer that I had called her names (while crying) and that I was racist towards her. So I got to take down my own customer complaint.
She sat on the ground behind the counter while I cruised the store and would leave the front unattended to go smoke with people in her area and in her view.
Then that evening, while I was counting the registers, her drawer was off by twenty dollars. So I had to recount my drawer, rebalance it, count petty cash, both were even, and she started whining she wanted to go home so she said she was gonna give me half of what was owed so she wouldn’t be, ‘so off.’ I was tired and let her give me ten out of her own pocket. Locked up, went home. Next day, I opened the store. The petty cash and drawers were now fine, and our deposit took a hit. When the store manager came in, I told her everything that had happened, and she laughed and said ‘Wow she really hates you.’
I asked if she was gonna fire her, and she said, ‘Nah.’
It wasn’t until I mentioned the money that she finally decided that everything wasn’t okay, and she had my back, we have a case against her, and now we can fire her.
So I learned that it’s okay to abuse me as long as nothing gets stolen.”
He Was Fired, But Not Until Months After Flooding The Store
“Home Depot coworker dropped a pallet on a waterline feeding the store’s sprinkler system, pulling it down enough to cause a high-pressure leak right next to — right INTO — a running heater…above a row of register stations…in the middle of winter.
It was about half an hour before the fire department got the main line turned off, and at that point, there were maybe three or four inches of water on the sales floor. We opened up the front doors and had every associate on hand running wet/dry vacs or sweeping out water, which froze almost immediately right where customers would be coming in (this happened maybe 45 minutes before opening).
The dude that did it refused to take responsibility, saying the line should have been more clearly marked, despite being bright red, having a ‘safety’ area designated on the floor with diagonal yellow stripes, and ‘SPRINKLER SYSTEM’ signage right next to it.
He did end up getting fired a few months later for cussing out a superior.”
She Cancelled All Sales On Black Friday
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“We have this thing called in-store pick up where you basically place an order online and pay the online price but you get to pick it up at a nearby store instead of waiting for it to be shipped from states away.
So Black Friday comes along and for some reason, in-store pick up was still available. So all day the day before and all day on Black Friday, we have about 3 managers picking up items off the sales floor to place on hold for the people placing the orders online, totaling about 300-400 online orders in 2 days.
A different manager from another department decided it would be nice to help and cancel the orders that we were out of stock for. Little did she know she toggled the section where all orders were there and she deleted A-T (by last name) before she realized what she was doing. A majority of the orders were canceled. Even the ones that were completed and paid for. So…the next day people start showing up to pick up their orders to find that we didn’t have them in our system. Their orders were canceled and it would take 72 hours for the money to be refunded to their cards, leaving them with no money for three days, after the Black Friday sales were long gone.
I had several people screaming that they had spent $2,000 on gifts and that now they didn’t have the gifts or the money to buy them from the floor. All in all, she was promoted later to a higher position, I don’t know how she kept the job.”
Actually Glad She Wasn’t Fired
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“I once worked at Sam’s Club for an outside company that hands out free samples of food. This was during a huge event (Taste of Sam’s) and we were busy! One girl had just run out of food but was cooking more. A customer came up and just started complaining. The girl came around her cart and got in the customers face and said, ‘the food will be ready in 20 minutes you fat, nasty, witch, if you don’t like that take your entitled butt away from my cart and move along to the next one. I ran out, it happens, don’t be a prick to me when I’m trying my hardest to keep up with all you entitled morons!’
I swore up and down that she was going to get fired but she didn’t. She was just given a verbal warning and asked to go home that day. We all clapped for her after of happened!”
She Killed The Fish But Faced No Consequences
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“I worked at a pet store for a long time. We had a disease outbreak and we were bleaching individual tanks and then dechlorinating the tanks and testing them before putting them back in with the main system.
We had been undergoing the process for about a week at that point, but apparently ‘Red’ hadn’t been paying attention at all during that time period.
She reattached a tank half-full of bleach to the main tank system. As I walked into the store (it was my day off, I was just there for lizard food), I just see the majority of the fish moving around listlessly. Then they started death-spiraling. I point this out to my coworkers and they start freaking out. One of them starts dumping bottles of de-chlorinator into the system.
Meanwhile, ‘Red’ fishes out her favorite fish, blood parrot cichlids, and starts blowing into their gills, trying to do some weird approximation of CPR. She ends up throwing them into the separate sick tank in hopes of saving them.
She killed 99% of the fish and I had to help shovel out their corpses while crying the entire time.
She didn’t get fired and never took responsibility for the event.”
She Really Doesn’t Like To Work
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“We have a girl who calls out for almost every single one of her shifts. When she doesn’t call out she begs everyone to take her shifts. Out of every 10 shifts she is given she only ever actually shows up for one or two. Whenever she does show up she almost always asks to leave early anyway for any of the many excuses she has up her sleeve.
She has received seven serious write-ups for her attendance/reliability. Most people are sacked after three serious write-ups. Somehow she keeps sneaking on by. Every time she gets another one I think, ‘Okay this will be the one’ but she still somehow works here. She was actually fired once in the past for these very same patterns but for some reason they let her come back only for her to pull the same stuff all over again.
Anyway, right in the middle of our busy season this most recent summer she asked for three weeks off. She was told that they would give her one week but anything more than that would be considered her resignation. So she took the three weeks off anyway, and during that time all of her scheduled shifts were left uncovered. That’s at least 15+ no call no shows and we were always left understaffed and messed up because of it.
Yet after her little vacation, she resumed working with no repercussions. Nothing was ever said about it. We’ve had to let people go for far, far less. I don’t understand it. I like her as a person and when she is here she is a great worker but that’s the problem, she’s never actually here.”
He Trashed Cars
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“I worked at a box store automotive shop.
This was an old-timer I worked with.
One time, he backed a customer’s car out of the shop into another customer’s car.
Another time he lifted a customer’s car with the passenger door open. The safety mechanism runs from front to back on this side. He crunched the door. In order to lower the vehicle, we had to crunch the door another inch to pull the safety release.
I can’t remember all the other dumb stuff but he never got fired. Eventually, they closed the shop a couple years after I left and he worked in the housewares section.”
At Least She Came In?
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“I used to work retail. A girl I worked with came to work completely hammered one day. She was slurring, struggling to walk and just all around making a huge scene. I had no idea how she even managed to get to work. I wasn’t there that day, but my coworkers told me that one of the higher-ups in the company came in for a surprise visit that same day and sent her home. I thought she was going to be for sure fired but I ended up seeing her again on my next shift. No idea how she got away with that one.”
She Never Showed Up And Never Got Fired
“Back when I worked in retail, there was this girl who worked the customer service desk who’d regularly not show up. Keep in mind this was the position that couldn’t really be done in a lazy way and was the first point of contact for customers; it got left to whoever else was on the register (i.e., me) to hold down the fort and have to call the manager if anybody needed to do a return. It was one of those situations where the managers put up with her simply because they had no one better to replace her.
Last I heard from her was that she’d gotten another job somewhere nearby; the catch was that she’d been trained as a permanent employee there right before the holidays, despite the fact that she was planning to move back to her hometown as soon as she finished her last semester at university (you know, right before Christmas!).”