No One Wants To Work Anymore And I'm Sick Of It

It's a never ending cycle.

I am so sick of getting substandard care absolutely everywhere I go. I really mean it. Nobody wants to work these days. I am so tired of going in to a store or going to get help from a service that I pay for only to be met with attitude and it taking three times at long because nobody wants to do their job.

Yesterday was a mess. Started by going to a doctor's appointment for my fiance and the receptionist was loudly asking people to confirm their doctor, home address, and pharmacy. I heard the doctor, home address, and pharmacy of every single person that came into the waiting room. I also heard some of their prescriptions.

Then we went to brunch at a little diner/cafe that we previously loved. Up until yesterday it was one of our go-to reliable places for basic quality and value. Now I've posted before about how I never send food back unless there is something really wrong with it. I had rye toast that was so burnt you couldn't see the rye seeds, the hash browns were actually uncooked in the middle, and the "scramble" that we got was scrambled eggs with huge chunks of sausage and bacon and ham just thrown into it. You can see they just ripped it into pieces with their hands and took no effort whatsoever. Inch long pieces of bacon, etc.

The problem is that when you present somebody with food, that is a representation of all the effort and care that you put into the meal. If the server whose job is to check for quality control saw nothing wrong with this, then I no longer trust that they are following other basics standards of cleanliness, quality, etc. If you cut corners and cannot meet basic standards on the most important aspect of your job, I have no choice but to believe that this applies every other area. The most important job that a restaurant has is to put food in front of somebody that they actively want to eat. That's the reason for existing.

Then I posted about how I had to go to AT&T and the employee actively and deliberately refused to help me. He kept claiming that I needed to do something that was going to cost me money that I knew for absolutely certain that I did not need to do. Turns out that there was a network error but it took talking to six different AT&T people and going to two different stores before I found out that the problem was with AT&T, not my phone. Only two of those six people had basic manners.

I also had to deal with my bank and the fact that they have now lost the third debit card in a row and I still don't have access to that account. I don't have a card I can use to make purchases. All I can do is transfer the money to my backup account that I thankfully had, and as I mentioned yesterday that's causing that account to have fraud alerts for unusual activity. Which takes time out of my day. And the customer service representative I was speaking to was very unhelpful. I kept getting a whole lot of "well I apologize but there's nothing I can do". The entire reason a bank exists is people trust them to keep their money safe and trust them to allow access to their money when needed. My bank is failing to do this and no one I've spoken to is even the tiniest bit motivated to help me fix this problem. Every single one of them treated me like I was bothering them at their job.

I have walked out of several stores in the last few weeks because they are just filthy, the shelves are so disorganized I can't find what I want, the lines are half an hour long, and about half the staff is in a bad mood. When eating out or going through a drive-thru, I have had to throw away many meals lately that were simply not up to basic standards of food (like not fully cooked in a few cases. And can somebody tell me why Wendy's burgers suddenly taste like soap? I've stopped going there because the last several times, I've had to spit out my food). My allergies are getting ignored a lot more often. I'm having to fight more to not be served a food that will not cause anaphylaxis which is why I have to avoid two of the restaurants near me because they simply don't respect my allergies. I am asking for food that is warm, the basic standards that we've come to expect from places like Mcdonald's, and I expect to have things like napkins in there because food is messy. I expect to have the sauces that go with the 20 nuggets that I ordered. More than one, since one packet is not enough for 20 nuggets.

I expect basic quality and value. They are refusing to provide it. So how do we fix this?*

Companies need to start fucking paying their employees so that they want to be there, can get the workload done, have enough staff for an even and reasonable workload, and treat them like the human beings they are because they are the basis for your business You can barely motivate them to walk in the door let alone work as I say further in my article The Other Side of Low Wages

Lastly, we really do need to start putting in more complaints and more bad reviews. If you get bad service somewhere that is objectively uncalled for, all these companies have websites for you to leave a review. Maybe if we talk enough about how bad these companies are doing, the word will get around, people will stop going, and the companies will realize "we actually do have to provide quality to get customers.". Who wants to advertise with a company that has a bad reputation? Look what happened with Twitter as a grand scale example. Ad companies pulling from that platform because no one wants to use it. Everyone knows it's trash.

So if you know the convenience store near you is always trashed and there's never soap in the bathroom, write a review. If you know that every time you go to your doctor, the receptionist violates privacy, write a review. You don't have to call out the person by name because this isn't about the individual person, it's about the business holding themselves accountable for having quality across the board (unless the individual person was objectively awful like racist, threatening, etc. That should of course be reported specifically).

When you write the review, make sure that you are not putting the blame on the employee. Write it such like “ABC Clothing Store is consistently understaffed, causing major disruptions in the store. The store is always messy because there are never enough employees. When I went in yesterday, there were lines 20 people deep and the staff was scrambling to check everyone out and clean up the shelves. I gave up trying to buy shoes because I simply couldn't find where my size was. An alarm was going off for 10 full minutes because no one was able to get to it to turn it off. I had to walk out without purchasing anything because not only could I not find the items, there was no help, the alarm was distracting, and I did not have time to stand in a line that long. Very disappointed that a company with such high revenue pays its employees so little and understaff their locations to the point that I literally cannot shop there” (actual experience I recently had and how I would write the review)

If they have no problem with the standards that they provide, then they will have no problem with us talking about it. If they have a problem with what we're saying, maybe they need to give us a different story.

*All this aside no one's getting paid enough. I know you aren't getting paid enough to do your job, but please do it. We all have bad days, but we do still need to help each other. I know you aren't getting paid enough to, none of us are. That doesn't mean that we drag each other down. It doesn't mean that we simply accept that everywhere we go nobody's paid enough so nobody wants to do anything. We are all sinking in the same ship called Corporate Greed. Whatever you do don't just sit there. Either do your job, or help us dismantle the rampant unchecked capitalism. Maybe both at the same time 🤷🏻‍♀️