In which I live up the title of my journal and hate it here.
WARNING: I may get whiny and ranty. It's getting late and I'm exhausted.
So, I know I really shouldn't complain. I have two jobs (albeit one is still merely in a "potential" slot) when a lot of people can't even get ONE.
Of these two jobs, I get paid... well, more than minimum wage, at the very least. The work is never outright Terrible or Horrible, however, it varies between mind-numbingly slow, soul-crushingly busy and/or hostile, and other-adverbingly pointless. Also, both of these jobs are dead-set against my usual set of core principles about things, as I will now explain.
I work for a pizza company (I have probably mentioned which specific one before, oh well, I'm keeping it nameless at the moment, although you can probably figure it out fairly quickly) which knowingly over-charges for its pizza while hiding under a pretense of "freshness". Sure, that dough is never frozen, unlike our major competitor's. It arrives off of a refrigerator truck at 33 degrees Fahrenheit, but that's technically not "frozen". It's all in the semantics, you see. I say that they knowingly overcharge. I was told in my managerial training class that "people pay a premium price for our pizza". They KNOW they're not the cheapest, but some of these charges are ridiculous.
E.g.: The amount of onions in a "topping" amount on a pizza will cost, at most, a few pennies. This would be if you got absolutely nothing but onions on your pizza (it happens). If you order onions on your pizza, I will charge you about $1.50 for them. That's about $1.47 of PURE PROFIT, per pizza. If you want, say, pepperoni and onions? Well, you're getting charged the same amount, but I'm using fewer onions. And a LOT of people want onions. Mushrooms are even WORSE, both in demand and cost/price ratio (and taste, eew).
My other job, selling tea (also keeping the store nameless, although if you know anything about high-end tea sales, it's pretty fucking obvious), is much less covert in its dealings, which in a way only makes it worse. They openly sell items to people who have larger disposable incomes than I have TOTAL income.
E.g.: I've seen people walk in and drop $200 without batting an eye... on TEA. There are single items in that store that cost about 1/3rd of my monthly rent. If you were to buy the whole set, (and OF COURSE we recommend that you DO, because aesthetics are important to the whole relaxation... thing) it would be more than my monthly rent, and this isn't even including the tea! The minimum sales goal is $60 an HOUR.
Needless to say, the modi operandi for these places is, simply "take money from these suckers", which, at times, I simply can't care about. Sure, these people are spending their hard-inherited money on stupid shit. (If you're buying tea that's $25 for 2 oz, you're either too dumb to have a decent job, and thus are on a trust fund or inheritance, or you're so absolutely devilishly smart that I can not comprehend it.) It's their money, so it's their choice, right? Right.
The thing is, even though it's wholly their decision to spend this money in these dumb ways, I can't help but feel like I'm taking advantage of them.
The pizzeria will always be a bit of a gold mine in America, because Americans are, by nature, fat and lazy and they want hot food delivered to their door (most of them would get it delivered to their fucking mouths if they could), and they don't care who gets it to them, so long as it is Right (by their standards of course, otherwise it should be both Right and Free). They don't care how much they're paying for soda, because if they didn't get it delivered, man, they'd have to put on SHOES and go down to the fucking CVS that's like, all the way down the street! That's too fucking far, man, just pay the extra dollar for that 2-liter instead. Oh, yeah, and get those fucking cheese sticks. Those things are awesome. Oh yeah, and some hot wings. Oh yeah, and a triple bypass.
I hate working at the pizzeria because a. I'm never going to be given the rank I was promised, which means I'll never be earning the bonus I was told I'd be getting, because my area supervisor is a fucking douchebag who doesn't want to PAY said bonuses. Yeah. I had a situation where I was completely OUT of small and medium dough. His response? A shrug. Not even a "I'll look into that" or a "Call so and so". He fucking shrugged and walked out the door. This is the man who berated me because I can't slap dough fast enough with my fucked up wrist and told me "I didn't deserve to be an assistant manager".
And the tea store. Dear science, the tea store. 90% of what I am told to say to the people at the tea store is utter horseshit. I can tell it's shit, but they take my words and eat it up, because I have a fucking store-branded apron on, which implies that I am an Authority on Tea. I'm not. I can't even remember half of what the hell this stuff is supposed to do. The best part? What the tea actually does? DOESN'T MATTER. The supposed health benefits? Don't matter. The customer? Doesn't matter. All that matters is that we sell them overpriced tea and that we get that money into the store, at least $60 worth per hour. That's it.
Oh, and make sure that you get this $30 jar of unprocessed imported rock sugar that doesn't change the flavor of the tea, it just sweetens it, because that's not totally retarded. (Last I checked, the act of sweetening something is changing the fucking flavor from not-sweet to sweet.)
I already hate the tea store mainly because I'm shoveling neo-hippie crap into people's mouths, one steaming cup at a time. Also, whoever did the tax stuff for me? Yeah, they fucked it up. I found that out today. Apparently, I earned unemployment last year (which is completely impossible). That or I'm a felon. So, under penalty of perjury, I'm not signing this fucked up piece of paper. No. No way, I'm not potentially fucking up my life because someone clicked the wrong goddamned radio button.
...Fuck it, I'm calling off tomorrow. It's 5 AM, I worked all day, and I really don't want to go stand in a mall all day yelling at people to try tea they don't want and couldn't afford anyway. Seriously, it's the biggest ego-attack I've ever had. I get to offer people FREE THINGS and they say "no" or they just openly ignore me for four full hours!
I simply can't deal with that shit right now. No wonder they were hiring so quickly.
So, to get down to the brass tacks of this rant, I am simply not cut-throat enough for business, specifically sales goal-based retail.
This is especially sinister if you take into consideration that there have been a few points in my life where I honestly wondered if I was a fucking sociopath, due to things I've thought or actions I've considered.
Just let that one sink in.
So, I know I really shouldn't complain. I have two jobs (albeit one is still merely in a "potential" slot) when a lot of people can't even get ONE.
Of these two jobs, I get paid... well, more than minimum wage, at the very least. The work is never outright Terrible or Horrible, however, it varies between mind-numbingly slow, soul-crushingly busy and/or hostile, and other-adverbingly pointless. Also, both of these jobs are dead-set against my usual set of core principles about things, as I will now explain.
I work for a pizza company (I have probably mentioned which specific one before, oh well, I'm keeping it nameless at the moment, although you can probably figure it out fairly quickly) which knowingly over-charges for its pizza while hiding under a pretense of "freshness". Sure, that dough is never frozen, unlike our major competitor's. It arrives off of a refrigerator truck at 33 degrees Fahrenheit, but that's technically not "frozen". It's all in the semantics, you see. I say that they knowingly overcharge. I was told in my managerial training class that "people pay a premium price for our pizza". They KNOW they're not the cheapest, but some of these charges are ridiculous.
E.g.: The amount of onions in a "topping" amount on a pizza will cost, at most, a few pennies. This would be if you got absolutely nothing but onions on your pizza (it happens). If you order onions on your pizza, I will charge you about $1.50 for them. That's about $1.47 of PURE PROFIT, per pizza. If you want, say, pepperoni and onions? Well, you're getting charged the same amount, but I'm using fewer onions. And a LOT of people want onions. Mushrooms are even WORSE, both in demand and cost/price ratio (and taste, eew).
My other job, selling tea (also keeping the store nameless, although if you know anything about high-end tea sales, it's pretty fucking obvious), is much less covert in its dealings, which in a way only makes it worse. They openly sell items to people who have larger disposable incomes than I have TOTAL income.
E.g.: I've seen people walk in and drop $200 without batting an eye... on TEA. There are single items in that store that cost about 1/3rd of my monthly rent. If you were to buy the whole set, (and OF COURSE we recommend that you DO, because aesthetics are important to the whole relaxation... thing) it would be more than my monthly rent, and this isn't even including the tea! The minimum sales goal is $60 an HOUR.
Needless to say, the modi operandi for these places is, simply "take money from these suckers", which, at times, I simply can't care about. Sure, these people are spending their hard-inherited money on stupid shit. (If you're buying tea that's $25 for 2 oz, you're either too dumb to have a decent job, and thus are on a trust fund or inheritance, or you're so absolutely devilishly smart that I can not comprehend it.) It's their money, so it's their choice, right? Right.
The thing is, even though it's wholly their decision to spend this money in these dumb ways, I can't help but feel like I'm taking advantage of them.
The pizzeria will always be a bit of a gold mine in America, because Americans are, by nature, fat and lazy and they want hot food delivered to their door (most of them would get it delivered to their fucking mouths if they could), and they don't care who gets it to them, so long as it is Right (by their standards of course, otherwise it should be both Right and Free). They don't care how much they're paying for soda, because if they didn't get it delivered, man, they'd have to put on SHOES and go down to the fucking CVS that's like, all the way down the street! That's too fucking far, man, just pay the extra dollar for that 2-liter instead. Oh, yeah, and get those fucking cheese sticks. Those things are awesome. Oh yeah, and some hot wings. Oh yeah, and a triple bypass.
I hate working at the pizzeria because a. I'm never going to be given the rank I was promised, which means I'll never be earning the bonus I was told I'd be getting, because my area supervisor is a fucking douchebag who doesn't want to PAY said bonuses. Yeah. I had a situation where I was completely OUT of small and medium dough. His response? A shrug. Not even a "I'll look into that" or a "Call so and so". He fucking shrugged and walked out the door. This is the man who berated me because I can't slap dough fast enough with my fucked up wrist and told me "I didn't deserve to be an assistant manager".
And the tea store. Dear science, the tea store. 90% of what I am told to say to the people at the tea store is utter horseshit. I can tell it's shit, but they take my words and eat it up, because I have a fucking store-branded apron on, which implies that I am an Authority on Tea. I'm not. I can't even remember half of what the hell this stuff is supposed to do. The best part? What the tea actually does? DOESN'T MATTER. The supposed health benefits? Don't matter. The customer? Doesn't matter. All that matters is that we sell them overpriced tea and that we get that money into the store, at least $60 worth per hour. That's it.
Oh, and make sure that you get this $30 jar of unprocessed imported rock sugar that doesn't change the flavor of the tea, it just sweetens it, because that's not totally retarded. (Last I checked, the act of sweetening something is changing the fucking flavor from not-sweet to sweet.)
I already hate the tea store mainly because I'm shoveling neo-hippie crap into people's mouths, one steaming cup at a time. Also, whoever did the tax stuff for me? Yeah, they fucked it up. I found that out today. Apparently, I earned unemployment last year (which is completely impossible). That or I'm a felon. So, under penalty of perjury, I'm not signing this fucked up piece of paper. No. No way, I'm not potentially fucking up my life because someone clicked the wrong goddamned radio button.
...Fuck it, I'm calling off tomorrow. It's 5 AM, I worked all day, and I really don't want to go stand in a mall all day yelling at people to try tea they don't want and couldn't afford anyway. Seriously, it's the biggest ego-attack I've ever had. I get to offer people FREE THINGS and they say "no" or they just openly ignore me for four full hours!
I simply can't deal with that shit right now. No wonder they were hiring so quickly.
So, to get down to the brass tacks of this rant, I am simply not cut-throat enough for business, specifically sales goal-based retail.
This is especially sinister if you take into consideration that there have been a few points in my life where I honestly wondered if I was a fucking sociopath, due to things I've thought or actions I've considered.
Just let that one sink in.