I have worked at Starbucks, as a barista, for 2 years now. The first year was great! All of the barista's were happy, there were hardly ever any complaints from customers, and everyone was excited to give the customer's the "true Starbucks experience."
I should also mention that before i worked at Starbucks, I worked at a little, hole in wall, coffee/sandwich/ice cream shop. The owners got their coffee from Italy and it was so amazingly good! It took me at least 6 months before I could hold down any Starbucks coffee.
At the beginning of my second year at Starbucks, we were graced with a new store manager. He was extremely uptight and a 'neat freak,' although the latter was a more "do as I say, not as I do" kind of thing. He would get us excited and try to get us to compete with each other and make a game of it, but after the second day, he would stop following through. When asked why we stoped, his response would always be "no one was doing what they were supposed to do!" But, in all actuality, how could we when he only gave us one day to do it and over half of the employee's didn't even know what was going on yet?
During the time that this manager was at our store, I had a family emergency. Starbucks policy is that if you call in before your shift the supervisor on duty is to call around to find someone to fill in. If you just need to switch a day with someone, you are to find a replacement yourself.
I called my boss 7 hours before my shift was scheduled to start to let him know what was going on and I probably wouldn't be able to make it. He seemed okay with it and thanked me for giving him the heads up. About 4 hours later, I called him back to let him know that I definitely would not be able to make it in. He got huffy this time and hung up on me when I was in mid sentence.
The next day, I called and told him that it looked like I might not be able to make it in for a couple of days and I needed him to try to find someone to cover my shifts because I was in the hospital with a family member. He started speaking quite loudly and sounded utterly annoyed. He told me that he didn't care where I was or what was going on, I needed to write down names and numbers right then and there and start calling around myself to get my shifts covered. He started rattling off names and numbers and asked if I was even bothering to write them down. I said "no." He started lecturing me as if I was a little kid and finally asked why I wasn't writing. I was extremely exhausted from being up at least 24 hours straight and very hot headed from his treatment, so my answer was this: "I'm in the hospital you freaking moron!" And then I hung up on him and called a friend that I work with to get the number for the corporate office.
We now have a new store manager. At first, I thought that she was going to be great. She was very straight forward and didn't try to sugarcoat things (after all, we are all supposed to be grownups here, right???). On top of that, she smiled and laughed a lot, which was a very nice change from the manager we had before. Her first order of business was to take away all mall employee discounts. Over half of our customers are mall employees. When they found out about the discounts being taken away, many of them started going elsewhere and on my breaks, there would always be at least one mall employee that would come up and gripe to me about our new store manager. I always told them that she's new here and I pointed out all of her qualities that I thought were really good. Soon, many of them started seeing past the new no discounts policy, and started seeing what I did.
But, this series has taken a turn of unfortunate events. The new store manager is now looking for any small thing to write me up for. I am now on my final writeup and looking desperately for another job.
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