Witness: Retail Hell
Working in retail seems like an easy job from the outside. It’s just helping the customers with choosing products and checking out, while also restocking shelves as needed. Right? Not quite. This façade is, in fact, quite deceptive.
Retail is a horror filled with the pain of maintaining a cheery customer-facing demeanor even while dealing with mean managers, petty pay, harrowing hours, and curmudgeonly colleagues.
Here’s what some Redditors have to say about their experience working in retail.
1. Loyalty Is A One-Way Street
This is the tale of my best friend, Sara. She hired me back in 2007, and we became very close. We worked at a small, local chain of gas stations. Our district manager was a tough, but she knew her job. We will call her Mary.
Mary was very good at her job and we respected her a lot. She taught us both so much about our job and how to handle a store like ours.
In 2009, our company was sold to another small, local company because the CEO was preparing for retirement. Enter Dave. Dave is a terrible person and the big boss at the new company.
He likes having a gaggle of women around him that he can control and belittle. Tammy was our new district manager, and we weren’t sure that we liked her either.
I ended up leaving the company in 2012, and Sara was heartbroken that I left her, but understood. Unfortunately, it all went downhill for her. She was put on a pedestal by Dave. She was hard working, dedicated, and became the company fixer. Every time a store was in peril, they would move Sara into that store. She would clean it up and get it making a profit again.
Dave promised Sara a promotion to district manager, but the job opened up and Dave gave it to Melissa. Melissa was eventually caught pinching from an ATM and fired. Dave again promised the spot to Sara, but hired Alex instead. Alex quit before he got fired. Dave again promised the spot to Sara, and once again, passed her over. This happened one more time.
Every time it happened—four times in total—I would console her while she cried, but she always stayed fiercely loyal to Dave. Over time, Sara and Tammy had become really good friends and Sara loved having Tammy as a district manager.
Meanwhile, Dave made the decision to move Sara to a rural store. She was happy because it was closer to where she lived and she could not take the heartbreak anymore.
She found her home there as the manager. But one day, Dave decided to really mess with Sara. He had hired Mary from the previous company and made her Sara’s district manager. Sara was thrilled to be working with Mary again, but Mary had changed. She was unfocused, disoriented, ditzy, and quite frankly, a mean person. She was not the Mary we knew and respected.
Sara was at her wits’ end dealing with Mary being around all the time, messing up her store. Yet Sara still stayed fiercely loyal to the company and to Dave. Here’s where the real heartbreak happened. In late 2020, Sara suffered a brain injury. She ended up in the hospital for weeks, unable to talk properly and had to relearn motor skills.
Dave promised her that when she was ready, her manager spot would be waiting for her. Then he promised her that a job would be waiting for her. Then he let her go so that he wouldn’t have to pay her insurance anymore. He did not tell her this.
She found out when she got a letter stating that her insurance was cancelled. 11 years, people.
11 years of hard work, dedication, and loyalty for long hours, horrible pay, and horrible treatment, just to be thrown away without Dave even having the courtesy to talk to her about it. Once again, I consoled her.
I was angry, sad, infuriated, and cried with her. We now both hate Dave. But she still is fiercely loyal to the company.
I tried to convince her that she had a case against them, but she won’t sue. That company was her whole life, and after the blood, sweat, and tears she put into it, she was left with nothing. Not even a severance.
Moral of the story: be loyal to your good co-workers and managers, but steer way, way clear of bosses like Dave and Mary.
These retail companies don’t care about you and never will. One broken promise is reason enough to leave. There’s nothing in it for you except your paycheck, and there’s lots of retail places hiring. Take care of yourself.
Stand up for yourself. Give them enough respect to not get fired, but always put your needs first. Except for the wonderful few, they do not care about you and will get rid of you at the drop of a hat.
Sara is still recovering, but her progress slowed when she was let go. She doesn’t feel like she has a reason to get better. Just seriously, I hope that you get what’s coming to you, “Dave.”
2. Waking Nightmare
I used to work for a quaint art retail shop in Kent in the UK. My husband and I relocated far away from our friends and my family for this job as it was good pay.
I had previously been a huge fan of the company and it sounded like an opportunity I would love to take. Luckily, it was an online-only business so no customers at all! Sound completely ideal? I thought so!
I suspect my ex-boss there was, and I don’t say this lightly, a sociopath of some kind.
She would come in one day, be absolutely sweet as anything, gift me with free art supplies—once even a free coffee machine—listen to your troubles and offer pretty sound advice. The only issue was the 80% of the time in between these sweet moods.
During these times, she would scream, shout, threaten people with their jobs, throw things around the office, and once she thrust a paper tray with an inch of dust into my face to aggravate my asthma.
She actually screamed at my colleague an inch from his face once because he dared to ask her how she was that day. She was also furious that a pregnant worker there dared to go home with extreme morning sickness.
She called me almost every weekend, often screaming at me because her house was a complete mess and it was my fault. Bear in mind that none of us worked at her house. We had a unit miles away from her apparently mucky house!
I even took out a second phone contract so I could switch my sim card out on evenings and weekends to give myself a break from her.
You never knew where you stood with her. I would spend weeks unable to eat, feeling sick at the thought of going in to her unbearable mood, and then suddenly, she’d come in with Krispy Kremes for us all to “thank” us. Honestly, this woman gave me emotional whiplash. But there was a bigger issue. Because it was a small company, she was HR.
She had external HR to raise cases against staff, but we had absolutely nowhere to go. I finally snapped after two years there and had a complete nervous breakdown.
I was so horrifically stressed, it physically manifested itself as shingles which, I was told by my doctor, is extremely rare for a 26-year-old otherwise healthy young woman.
During this sickness, she got one of her minions to sack me for “failure to do my job.” Yeah right. You sacked me because if you had it your way, you’d have us all there 24/7 grinding. Because she despised us having a life outside of work.
I thought about taking her to court for unfair dismissal, but I was so completely done with her and her nonsense that I chose to leave it all behind for the sake of my health.
I felt like my shingles was my body’s way of saying “please step away from this place,” and before I was sacked, I was genuinely terrified it could be a heart attack or something as equally dangerous next time.
Wind forwards a year and a half, me and my husband have moved back to the same town as my family and our friends.
I work for an office for Lidl which I completely adore. My husband has got his dream photography job, we’ve adopted a cat and life is very good.
So good in fact, that my review with the doctors yesterday resulted in myself being told that for the first time in 10 years, I’m not currently clinically depressed. I am genuinely so blessed at this moment in my life!
The only issue is when I go to sleep. I dream about this old boss three to four times a week, and I’m lying here at 4:30 am after the most horrific dream yet when my old boss was trying to trap and kill me. Thanks for that one, subconscious!
I won’t go into all the gory details. Just know that it was utterly terrifying, and I don’t plan on going back to sleep tonight.
Clearly, I’ve got some unresolved feelings and thoughts about this old boss. I sometimes regret walking away and not taking her to a tribunal for the terrible things she did to me, but I had to do what was best for my health in that moment in time.
And I am 100% healthier for that choice. I hope that one day, I can resolve whatever trauma it is my subconscious is experiencing, and I can be completely free to enjoy this lovely place in life I find myself in.
3. Talk To My Back
It was my last scheduled day to work, but my supervisor did not know because my manager refuses to communicate with anyone. I work replenishment so I got there and my supervisor gave me three full uboats of boxes to work out that day.
As I get closer to finishing them, an hour before my shift ends, I hear her shout my name.
I walk up to her and she is upset because she wanted me to do another uboat before I left. She expected me to finish the three I had in three hours. I told her that she should've told me that before I started so I could've budgeted my time better.
She yells, telling me that I should be working quickly no matter what and that my hours might get cut.
What did I do? I walked out. Right in front of her. Most satisfying moment of my life.
4. It’s All Fun And Games
I worked in an independent video game shop in London, UK when I was 18 to 22 years old. Final FantasyVIII on the PS1 came in via delivery with this pretty awesome-looking box that contained a memory card, a t-shirt and possibly some other stuff as well. This was to be sold at £44.99, the same price as the normal edition of the game.
Unfortunately, my manager saw this and...he wasn't pleased. So he decided to do something ridiculous. He took out the memory card and told me to put a company sticker on it, covering it up. I asked him again because I could not believe what I had heard. He asked me to do as I was told. As you can imagine, I was pretty dumbfounded by this and had no idea what to say.
Then, a young man came in to pay for his copy of the game but couldn't find his deposit slip. The manager said to him, “Well, that's not our problem, and we can't look in the books to say whether you did it or not.”
Thing is, I actually remembered him coming and putting down a £10 deposit for the game. I tried to speak up and each time that I did, I was shut down and told to be quiet.
My blood was boiling. Unfortunately, that young man, despite finding his deposit slip, was told that he had to pay the full amount and that the deposit book was "missing." This made me feel understandably infuriated, and no matter what I said, I was always told that I was wrong in what I was saying and that I did not know anything. But it got worse.
Days later, the memory cards were sold separately for profit, while the t-shirts and the other things that had been in the boxes were given to his friends and family. The boxes were to be destroyed.
Not just simply put in the bin, but ripped up so no one knew about it. It was one of the many horrible experiences that I faced working in that retail shop.
