When I started my job it was, dare I say, fun. We had a turntable, we had croissants sent daily from a local bakery, and when it got slow we would crack out UNO cards and shoot the breeze. The community building, as I’ve called it, is what kept the good order of my store (and its four other locations, at the time) in check. We worked hard, we goofed around, and customers complimented the energy we kept everflowing, day in and day out. The owners were, and continue to be, out of touch, which at the time meant the occasional memo about some sort of regulation, which we accounted to investors who were creeping their way into the big business picture VL (Van Leeuwen's) had been forming.
But within two weeks of me being there, things took a turn for the strange. Our croissants went away and were replaced with “housemade” pastries, which tasted like dirt but were issued under the store’s own proud label. The turntable was deemed unreasonable and inefficient for busy nights, which is a valid point, but its replacement, a 500 song playlist composed of every boring mid-thirties whiny indie duet you’ve ever heard, counterbalanced with the entire discography of The Beatles, seemed a little excessive.
What was happening to the little coffee and ice cream shop on East 7th Street?
It was the beginning of what, in the present tense, is becoming the corporate end.
If you’ve ever had to watch a business go corporate, it’s like watching a very apathetic killer whale eat a baby seal– it ain’t cute. There’s nothing more money hungry, more lacking in regard for others, than deciding you want your business to lose all of its personality, and with it all of its regular customers, carefully selected employees, and those employees' voices. Deciding that the people who work for you aren’t responsible enough to coordinate their own playlists, wear their own hats, and bring their own personality to the table, is basically saying that the people who work for you don’t matter. Which, after I did some assessing, is absolutely the case at my job.
Last summer (and this is perhaps my favorite story), after we had some shitty renovations done, the construction workers accidentally attached a pipe that was supposed to run through some sort of waterline to the freezer instead. So, every time we turned on the dipping well (where the scoops sit after you’re done putting them in the ice cream), the water would run, you guessed it, into the freezer. And it took a good amount of troubleshooting to realize this was the case, so when we did I called my manager, who was pregnant and in this case useless. She referred me to our “renovation guy” who we hired off the books to half-fix things. And then, when he didn’t answer, I called our owner. After explaining the situation, whereby I had ended up dumping water out of the freezer on an incredibly busy day, and then was, at some point, mopping the inside of the freezer, he said to me:
“I don’t really see how that’s possible.”
Not that he was shocked, and was coming over to check it out. Not that he was sorry, and was amazed such a thing could happen. But that he didn’t see the logistics of it, which is almost fair because the whole situation was not very ordinary and backward. However, he wasn’t interested in seeing any sort of another angle, nor was he willing to help. We made $5,000 in sales that day, with one functioning freezer and four people on hand. It was misery, it was hell, and it all happened while the owner sat back and collected profit.
This, for me, should have been my breaking point.
Instead, I stuck around and took orders from someone who had lost touch with the realities of working in service. I kept smiling and doing my job and swallowing all of the very dry pills of a growing business. I saw new stores open while we still struggled to keep ours intact; I saw regulars stop coming by because the prices had gone up and the quality had gone down; I saw our owner less and less. I saw a slurry of new office workers, I am just now seeing my favorite one to date leave, and I saw my own voice, and the voice of my coworkers, blatantly ignored. This is the fun of going corporate.
I am eager to leave, feeling that I have in some way been not completely disposable to the company, perhaps at times essential, and hoping to see the fun they have as they open five new stores in the city, expand their brand, and find that their own inability to take on responsibilities; their own shortcomings might, and I say might, come around to bite them in the ass.
When I first got my job, one of my favorite coworkers told me that he always used the bathroom on company time, it was a “life hack” of his– getting “paid to poop.” I will continue to count the hours of time that my coworkers spend pooping on company time, and revel in the thought of letting them lose money on the basis that we are, inescapably, all memos and scripted responses aside, undeniably human.
