Quickly spiraling into corporate hell - Store Staff Mud Bay Employee Review

There's so many things I could say. First of all, they operate by a "points" system .....like Amazon. You get a point every time you're late more than 15 minutes, or have to call out(for ANY reason). You can avoid the point by covering the missed time with PTO, which, by the way, accrues extremely slowly. Once you get to 7 points, you are fired. Being sick is not an exception for the points system. We don't get sick days, and actually get penalized for calling out sick. COVID used to be an exception, but they took away COVID protection at the beginning of the year. This means that if you get sick longer than you have PTO to cover....you're screwed Naturally, this means employees come to work sick extremely often. If you shop at mud bay, I guarantee you have exposed yourself to someone sick with COVID, flu, or any number of other illnesses. Nobody wants to come to work sick. But we also don't want to lose our jobs. I know someone who couldn't go to their close friends funeral because the leave for death outside of family is 2 days. They didn't have the PTO to cover the whole trip. Or the money for the flight, if they could have gone. You do not get ANY vacation days, paid or unpaid, except the 3 days a year the store is closed. They claim they pay a living wage but they absolutely do not. If you're full time they won't staff you more than 32 hours, the minimum to be considered full time in Seattle. The base pay is "good" comparatively for retail. For transparency, I make $20.50 as staff. However there's no room for growth. Leads get paid just a little over a dollar more then staff for twice the duties. Even the ASMs only get paid $25-something an hour. Managers are salaried, and then taken advantage of to the extreme and forced to work significantly longer hours than what is sustainable. Almost everyone I work with lives in low income housing, including myself. Keep in mind this is for Seattle. The pay rates are much lower in other counties. The company has suffered gross mismanagement and blames it on the employees. They recently released a "voluntary" restructuring program where we were forced to sign a document with a few options. The first option was to allow them to schedule you swing shifts. The second was to reduce your hours to part time. If you're a lead this means you have to step down to staff and receive lower pay. Anyone who volunteered to go part time lost their health insurance and other benefits. The other option was to quit, and receive a severance payment of about ....a weeks pay. Signing the document also includes a clause saying you won't sue the company. Technically you could have refused to sign it but that would mean they'd choose one of the options for you. So there was nothing voluntary about it. This led to a ton of people quitting. I'd also say about 8/10 people employed there are looking for other work. The theory is that this is intentional, so that they don't have to pay into unemployment for laying people off. There's also speculation that they might be doing this in preparation to sell the company. This isn't confirmed though. They're now understaffed everywhere with no plans to hire an adequate amount of workers. So you end up working twice as hard to make the same amount of money. Customers get mad at you for not being able to help them. The shelves are constantly messy because there's no time to keep the store looking nice when you need to be ringing people up and just doing your best to get the new shipment out. There will be multiple dogs barking at each other while you try to finish ringing people up fast enough to get someone out of the store. During all of this you are REQUIRED to give the "MBX" the mud bay experience. If you've ever thought "wow the employees are so nice here and love their jobs" well...most of us are good people. But if we are having a bad day and don't act cheery no matter what, we get penalized for it. You're not allowed to have any emotion except for "excited and happy to help a customer". You get treated worse than the dogs who come through the doors. They claim to value diversity but a large majority of people who work there are white. At their annual company get together a few years ago someone asked the CEO "why are there so few black people at mud bay" and they literally answered that "black people just don't want to apply here".....somehow I doubt it. There's other things I could write. If you're interested to see more there's an unaffiliated reddit page r/mudbay people have started posting on.