#Reflection/semi-vent incoming

[crispycreambacon]

Maybe I am autistic.......

[fuck-customers]

This is gonna be a long one so I apologize in advance.

So I submitted once or twice before about this particular job. I work at a local family owned high-end bakery/cafe in the downtown area of a semi-busy tourist town in Hawaii. I love the job because I have always loved working in a bakery, but this place has been rather different from the other bakeries I’ve worked at for various reasons (that aren’t all that important). I love the coworkers that I actually work with, and my boss and her husband, and a lot of our regular customers as well. But I just… need to vent a bit.

So we are not a super busy place. Like, we average less than $1,000 a day (excluding custom cake orders and catering orders which is where we get a lot of our income). Everything we make is made from scratch on premises, which I love about the place. We locally source as much as we can, which makes things a bit pricier, but it’s worth it for the quality.  However, because we are not super busy, we have our shifts organized a certain way. So there’s always a baker on site during the day, and they typically work 7-3pm and are basically our go-to managers (there are two of them, one is our “senior” cake decorator/baker and the other is a younger guy who recently got his culinary arts degree and just likes the bakery life). We also have three frontgirls, one girl who is a frontgirl and a cook, two additional cooks, and a couple of dishwashers who aren’t really relevant. We have our shifts split so there are two shifts a day, one open and one close. There is only ever one front girl and one cook on any given shift. Period. Front girls share their tips with the cooks because we both put in equal work for the customers, as is fair. I don’t really have a problem with this setup for the most part.

The thing is, we have shorter hours on the weekends, so when I got my new job (a standard 9-5 office job with good pay and benefits and a M-F schedule), we changed the schedule so I am only working on the weekends. I wouldn’t mind this if I wasn’t working open to close both days every single weekend with no breaks because I am the only frontgirl there (I literally have to ask permission from the baker to go to the bathroom). I have been very sick the last two weekends, and neither of the other two front girls could cover and the frontgirl/cook was already working as a cook, so the owner had to cover my shifts because I was literally on the verge of collapse and ended up going to urgent care. Strike one.

Our duties as part of the job, given that we aren’t a super busy place, include peeling the bananas for banana bread (which takes for fucking ever and is gross because we have to wait for them to get super ripe verging on liquidy), cutting the pastries, and making the lemonade/ice tea/ice coffee that we sell, as well as packaging the impulse buy stuff (cookies, homemade marshmallows, etc.). I have never at any point had difficulty getting all of these things done. However, when I was hired on, I was never properly trained on how to cut most of the pastries, and I know that at least one of the other front girls also wasn’t. So the bakers decided they didn’t like how we were doing it, and instead of properly teaching us how to do it, they would shoo us away and do it themselves. Which is annoying, but whatever, less work for us. I still keep busy with cleaning and stocking and everything else.

Well, apparently this week the store owner decided that “since we do the least work of any of the front girls in the past, we are now splitting tips three ways with the baker.” This is a text message I got accompanying the schedule from one of the other front girls. We are also having an emergency front girl meeting tomorrow (5/13). Now, I don’t really care that much about the money, that’s not an issue since my other job pays quite well. But the fact that they’re screwing the cooks out of part of their tips, as well as the principle of it given that the bakers don’t have any customer interaction whatsoever just… really irritates me. I love the bakers, don’t get me wrong, and they work very hard. But I’m pretty sure they’re already both at a higher pay rate than the rest of us, and some of the other people rely on tips to cover some of their expenses. Mind you, I at no point whatsoever have had any trouble getting my stuff done, even when I was cutting pastries and packing impulse buy stuff. At no point have I asked the bakers for help with that stuff, and many times I have gone out of my way to help them when I had free time. So the other front girls are just… not doing things, I guess?

And a slight tangent on that, they literally always leave the fucking bananas for me to peel over the weekend, when they’re almost completely liquid and 80% of them are full of maggots, and then the owners get pissed because that’s a waste of shit tons of bananas and I can only respond with “what do you want me to do I’m not putting maggotty bananas in the banana bread” like check the fucking bananas, if they’re ripe then fucking peel them it doesn’t take that much time/effort jesus fucking christ. And along side that, when I was working just opens before I had gotten my new job, I was lectured for leaving the banana bread (we have to slice four loaves of it for a hotel order daily) for the afternoon shift when 1) that was literally the only thing I left for them to do and 2) it takes less than 5 minutes to do. I was told off because “I’ve looked at the numbers and the afternoon shifts are way busier so I don’t want the closers doing banana bread.” Which is utter bullshit because every open-close I’ve worked, the morning is ALWAYS significantly busier, but the cash amounts don’t reflect it because the breakfast stuff costs way less than the lunch stuff.

I am tired and frustrated with this whole situation and am so glad to be turning in my two-week’s notice tomorrow and getting my weekends back and being officially done with foodservice for good. Sorry for the long post but I just really really needed to vent about all this before I go into that meeting tomorrow and over criticize my boss…