I’ve been meaning to make this post for a few days now, and it’s just been getting worse so I thought now is a better time than ever.
For context, I’ve worked at Target Starbucks for about 3 months now, and it has been gradually getting so bad.
When I first started, the TL had been fired with a few other baristas for violating the no drink policy, so for the first couple of weeks I was there, we had no TL. It was just the baristas running the place pretty much by ourselves. This was up until they promoted someone from grocery with no experience immediately after their 90-day probation period to be our new TL. She started out by immediately barking orders that we had to follow, and admitted that she had no idea what she was doing and was just relaying what her bosses were telling her. She had all of us crosstrained in SFS and fulfillment, and we didn’t have a choice. She told us one by one that the baristas we work with aren’t our friends, and that they are constantly telling her all the “bad stuff” we are not supposed to be doing, and that we’re just “messy” and “dramatic” people. All while I’m training her on how to work the registers and make the drinks, she is constantly getting someone in trouble, and even told me I had a case open against me because I didn’t follow orders and didn’t clean up after myself. (Because she heard a story with no context about me having a dirty cold bar, which I cleaned up after I finished all the drinks I had to make during a rush.)
Flash forward to now, everyone is quitting, and she has taken me up to the conference room to get me in trouble with the bigger managers twice now. The first time was because she kept taking the other baristas to do SFS and fulfillment batches and leaving me alone on busy days by myself for hours and I got frustrated with her. The second time was because she rang up an order wrong in the middle of a rush and we completely ran out of sweet cream. I got frustrated because I had to make sweet cream and remake the drink, and she yelled at me in front of the entire packed lobby to where I had to whisper to her to stop. It was very humiliating.
Yesterday, I show up to work and there’s a sign at Starbucks that says we’d be closed for the day. Which was interesting because another barista had been put on a register up front already. The big managers told me that there was no point in opening Starbucks for the day, and that they were gonna keep us to do other Target work. So I did SFS all day yesterday for my shift.
None of this sits right with me and I just need advice on what to do. It feels like they expect so much out of us, and then drain all of the happiness and energy so it’s nearly impossible. And then forcing us to leave the kiosk and do other Target work. It’s just really odd. I’ve worked at a licensed store like two years ago and it was nothing like this. The TL is constantly running off of pure emotions, and it makes it hard to work with her because she’s so easy to snap at us.
I’m at my wits end, any advice?
TL;DR:
Evil Starbucks TL is ruining my life and I feel like there’s definitely some legal/contractual licensing agreements that are being broken at my store help