Exit Strategy

Things have gotten difficult where I work: we have a new manager–I’ll call him Dick–and policies are being changed.

However, they are not changing for the better. We have been told that we only have 200 labor hours in each work week, so everyone across the board is getting their hours cut. Kent, who has been at my current store for the past six years and is one of the few people allowed to have overtime, has been told he can work no more than forty hours. Alex, who happens to be a minor, has been cut down to twelve hours. At least three other people are facing that same fate. Jeremiah, another co-worker, is now looking at a twenty hour week which is, as he put it, “Not worth the gas.” I’m in the same boat. I have seen my hours reduced from thirty-nine to around thirty-two or so a week. I’m lucky, as I have Prime and we don’t have to solely depend upon my paycheck to make ends meet. But it doesn’t stop there.

Now if the register is off, money will be taken out of the paychecks of anyone who may have worked that day. If the culprit cannot be found, then the entire group who was running the front line will be penalized. Kent has said that simply because he was the opener one morning and the till wasn’t at $250 he will be losing $37 out of his paycheck. I too have been threatened; I happened to be working a Saturday when someone made a mistake while on the cash register; the final total was twenty dollars short and if things hadn’t worked out, I would have lost five dollars from my hard earned pay. Hearing that made me absolutely livid. It might only be five dollars, but I had earned that pay; what made them think that they could take this away from me, especially if I wasn’t the culprit?

But things are changing in my world as well. I put in an application for Costco earlier in the month. They called not long after it was received. I set up an interview about a week and a half ago. Today, I got the call I for which I had been waiting.

My orientation is August 15th. I have been officially hired by Costco.

I’ll be putting my notice in at my current job. I’ll be as gracious as I possibly can and say that I’m sorry that I have to leave. But I’m really not sorry. I’m not sorry at all. Things have begun to morph into a parody of my old job, the one I had at a sub shop while I was living in North Carolina and I need to get out before things get even worse. I’ve seen the road ahead for my current job and it looks almost exactly the same as the one I traveled twenty years ago. I need to get out and get out now before things go truly bad.

I feel a bit badly for those I will be leaving behind. I was one of the few workers in that building that was consistent. I was one of the few who actually did my part rather than slack off and let someone else do the majority of the work. I was one of the few who never called in or refused to show up for a shift. I was one of the few that smiled and greeted customers and actually had conversations with them. In other words, I was one of the few that actually cared about my job.

I already feel a little twinge of sadness, as this has been my reality for the past six months. This job helped me get to BotCon this year and helped to pay the bills. But it has run its course and it is time for me to move on.

I knew that this day would be coming. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.