'I just put in my notice and turns out half of the staff is quitting too. My bosses don’t know.' UPDATED 2X

What do you owe your bosses when you leave a job? That was the question posed in a popular online post.

"I just put in my notice for the job that I hate and half of the staff is quitting too. My bosses don’t know that they will be left with two employees."

I’m the manager at a copycat of a popular bakery that sells cookies. I realized fairly quickly in to this job that the owners had no idea what they were doing. They had never even had a job in the food industry before opening 3 bakeries, so they would demand ridiculous things like leaving all rack covers off the cookie racks while we were open because the covers were “ugly.”

I tried to explain that, while the rack covers didn’t do a LOT, they did at least prevent excess air exposure, and it was unsanitary to leave ready to eat food out in the open for twelve hours a day.

They ignored me for over a month, all the while texting me asking me why they were getting complaints that our cookies were hard. I ended up having to tell the owners in one of my weekly reports, “if we wouldn’t leave food out at home like this, why are we leaving out our product that we’re trying to sell to consumers and expect them to like a stale cookie?”

A week after I sent them that report, all of a sudden they decided that we were going to start covering cookies again. They even bought us lids for our trays. There have been countless experiences with them that have made me question my sanity and experience that 10 years in the food industry has given me.

They tried to make me sell underbaked (raw) cookies because they refused to believe our ovens weren’t working properly; I had to reach out to corporate for validation that the issue was common and was indeed an oven issue and not a “user issue” like my boss tried to say.

Corporate tried to sell raw ingredients in an (in)edible cookie dough topping. I asked the individual that assists the founder with the development of the recipes if the recipe was correct; she said it was, and that she brought safety concerns to the founder, who felt that because she fed her kids the recipe and they turned out fine, it would be fine to sell to the public.

I informed my bosses of this information, and they plus the other franchisees in a group email ended up getting the item completely removed from the menu in a fury.

My bosses started complaining that they weren’t making money. Most would consider it quite well known that most businesses never even break even their first few years. No, they were shocked. Our cookies are MORE EXPENSIVE than our overpriced but extremely popular direct competitor. So many people look at the prices and walk right out the door.

Did the owners care when I brought this to their attention? No. Don’t forget, they opened three locations in under a year. They started cutting labor randomly throughout the last few months. By cutting labor I mean they would tell me I was scheduling way too much (after telling me the week before that I was doing fantastic) and that I need to trim or fire people immediately.

When I asked for a budget, they told me to cut until they said it was good. I shed over 50 scheduled hours and multiple people unfortunately and they’re still asking for more. I only have a 7 person staff including myself and the owners have never worked in the shop for more than an hour.

I’ve withstood a lot of cuts myself trying to preserve what staff I have left. They started having the teenage girls who work at night close alone to save money despite me telling them that many, many companies have policies against this to protect our safety. I was ignored until an angry parent of an underage employee tried to get me in trouble with the company. I had to take the fall.

I’m drastically underpaid for my position, and I found a different job that will be an instant almost $15K raise. I announced my departure to my staff and 4 people have put in their two weeks because they don’t like where the company is going and they know that I took the brunt of it so they didn’t have to. I haven’t told my bosses yet that almost the entire staff is going with me. I don’t really feel bad.

Commenters had a lot to say in response.

tossaway78701 wrote:

People don't quit jobs. They quit bad management. I wish you and your staff all the best.

OP responded:

Thank you, I appreciate that!

StnMtn_ wrote:

Management is what affects the employee experience. Your bosses suck.

OP responded:

Yeah they truly do…for a long time I thought they were good people that just were ignorant and were doing their best. This isn’t even half of it. The funny part is that every time I would tell them that they were wrong they would pretend I said nothing at all or they would just say to do it anyway.

When it started blowing up in their faces they would come to me with various complaints and I would again say what I had been saying about the issue. They’d act like I had never said it before, that it was brand new information and they had no idea it was wrong. Insert pikachu shocked face here. I have been gaslit nonstop for over a year lol.

TheEclecticPenguin wrote:

I held the full-time customer experience manager (CEM) position in a (well known) craft store. By 2020, even vefore Covid really hit, the company and this location had gone through too many negative changes and clearly employees had no value, were treated as replaceable (I mean, yeah, in retail you are, but don't TREAT employees that way).

They consistently set unattainable goals, and when I asked upper management about the bar being set too high and none of the staff were getting acknowledged for the hard work they were doing because they werent hitting the goal set for them, I was told "but they arent geting penalized for not hitting the goal."

So, yeah, by the time I got fed up, their whole mentality appeared to be we should be happy we aren't being punished for not achieving target as our reward for the hard work we did TRYING to hit the target.

Anyway, I'd worked there since I was 17, and at the time of my departure (31), everyone who knew how long I'd been with the company figured I was a lifer. I put in my notice I had found another job as a tech support advisor in a large call center company.

After I made that decision, the part-time CEM put in their notice, the stock manager (best one we'd ever had, would literally bleed for this company), the framing manager, and the full tim framer all left after me. They were basically left with the two salaried management staff and two trained employees who had been there longer than seasonally.

It was a mess. I don't feel bad. My new job saw my skill, advanced me to senior support, then mentor, and floor support, and now I lead my own team of senior advisors. In the year it took me to become a senior advisor, I was made it to the same wage it took 13 years at the other store to achieve. Sometimes, you gotta say enough is enough. I'm proud of you. 👏

OP responded:

Oh that is awful and hits home. Over the holiday season they set up a gift card sales competition. We had to sell $5000 in gift cards in 3 weeks when we hardly sold $2000 a week in product. The prizes were cash. Super funny part is that they didn’t specify that you had to meet the goal in order to win the prizes.

If we were a bigger company and the prizes were more than $75-$200, that’s grounds for a lawsuit for “false promises” from an employer. I asked them if we were getting our prizes and they said no, because we didn’t hit the absolutely insane goal. What we did get was pissed off brand new customers by pushing $25 gift cards onto their $5 single cookie purchase.

I wonder why people never came back…

I’m so proud of you for getting the hell out of there! I highly doubt this place will be open for the next year let alone 14 (according to the owners we lose $22K a MONTH) and I don’t know how you dealt with it.

cleverlux wrote:

Have you thought about opening your own shop?

OP responded:

I have been seriously considering starting a side hustle selling baked goods, but opening my own shop requires a lot of money I do not have 😭

Hedgehog-Plane wrote:

Quitting is the right thing to do. You could lose your professional reputation if you are named in a lawsuit if an female employee is harmed at closing time or a patron dies or is sickened from food borne illness.

Your management is endangering underaged employees and violating food safety guidelines (underbaked cookies), leaving food out uncovered for 12 hours (potential contamination from rodents, roaches, flies).

A week later, OP shared an update.

This past week was my last week at my bakery job with my out of touch owners, and boy has it been a doozy. Upon putting in my two weeks notice, I offered them my time to help find and train a replacement, and I also prepped for the upcoming month for them.

They have a tendency to hire their managers in the middle of a crisis and throw them in with little training, so I was doing my best to prevent that, and told them so. They were acting really weird, but didn’t say anything suspicious. No ads were posted on Indeed to replace me. My employees were dropping like flies.

One of them was a sh-ty friend who f-ked me over, and the rest all refused to stay if I wasn’t there. For months, the owners kept telling me I couldn’t staff to what I needed because of labor, but every time someone would need a day off it would screw everyone over because we didn’t have a staff. There was no one to cover shifts.

We were told to be alone most of the time to save on labor but that left us all doing the jobs of 2-3 people. I fought cutting too many hours from certain people because we would be fucked if we lost anyone. She would always tell me to not let myself be railroaded by my staff, but would also refuse to let me work overtime.

If I lost people from cutting their hours, I would be forced to fill in those positions and work overtime. So when I would ask them what they wanted me to do, they never had an answer besides telling me whatever I was doing was wrong. When I could hire they wouldn’t let me hire anyone who wanted more than 15 hours, but didn’t want me to hire students due to lack of availability.

So basically I couldn’t successfully hire at all because no one wants a job where you are required to have an open availability but get no hours and do the job of several people. This week when I offered to post an ad with the company indeed profile and assist them with hiring, they thanked me but declined.

See, a big reason why I wanted to find a new job wasn’t just because the company was a joke from the founders all the way down. I knew there was no way we were going to stay open for much longer. Our lease was up soon and we were drowning.

I just had a feeling that if we closed I would get zero heads up beforehand because they never seemed to handle anything in a manner that was appropriate or helpful for anyone besides themselves. My (ex) staff and myself received texts and calls from the owners today informing us that the shop was going to be “temporarily closed” this upcoming week, and basically dismissed the staff that was left.

Which tells me they likely won’t be opening the doors back up. There’s a lot of little details that I won’t include for the sake of brevity, but yeah. I quit my job and they shut the whole place down. It’s really sad that they wouldn’t just work in their own business. Instead, they chose to leave people without jobs with no notice. That says a lot about them as people, I think.

I get 9 days off between jobs that I am insanely grateful for. I haven’t gotten to have more than one day off in a row in over a year. I’m so excited to sleep through the night without all of the work stress and to get past this burnout I’ve been dealing with for so long. I got a whole bunch of arts and crafts supplies and I plan to spend a lot of time in the sun!

The commenters had a lot to say.

gardeninlovr wrote:

I hope you gave the good hardworking coworkers a heads up so they could polish up their resume and put out some applications and not be sol like the owners were setting everyone up for

OP responded:

Oh no, I told them all of this in advance. Most of them were already applying for other jobs because I had a feeling once I realized they weren’t hiring to replace me like they claimed they were.

Super_Rando_Man wrote:

Glad it all worked out for you at least hopefully the others land on their feet. Enjoy your rest and I hope the new job is fulfilling.

Appropriate-Law-8956 wrote:

Also, perhaps talk to a labor lawyer if you think you weren't paid for when you worked, including overtime. Business owners can be personally liable for that.

Branson_00 wrote:

Sometimes, the end of a job can be a blessing in disguise. It sounds like you were in a toxic work environment, and your departure may have even saved your former colleagues from further stress. Take this time to recharge and focus on yourself. Your next opportunity will be a better fit.

After the post gained a lot of traction, OP shared another update in the comments.

Holy smokes, I didn’t expect all this lol thanks for all the kind messages!!

I can definitely answer some questions that I’m seeing a lot of people ask.

First, the OG company is Crumbl, and no it’s not Tiff’s Treats.

I already had someone message me that works for the same owners at a different business they own (because for some reason they also own two swim schools) so I’m a bit uncomfy with outing myself much more.

Not that that’s going to help me 😅 At this point I’m tempted to post the 7 page expose I found about the company written by an ex franchisee who had to shut down their business. It’s quite a fascinating read.

Second, there’s a lot of reasons why I (repeatedly) convinced myself to stay as long as I did. I think a couple large contributors were my perfectionist tendencies and stupid high expectations I have for myself. Another was my team. When I’d come in and see my team busting their a-es for me every day, it broke my heart to think about leaving them.

I knew once I left the owners would f-k them over. We are all young women and I fought for their safety and wellbeing the best I could. I also really wanted to believe that they were good people who just needed help. Honestly, when I think back on a lot of my actions, I think I upheld my personal values well, and I’m not sure I would do much differently.

Even if I wanted to just throw in the towel and tell them what I really felt on those bad days, I didn’t want the ugly part of me taking over. I’ve been working really hard on that. I’m not a pushover though, even if it looks like it lol. I challenged them on their…odd…choices quite a lot.

I haven’t gotten to fully start my new job since today is the last day of my little vacation (womp womp). I got to meet my new boss earlier in the week and I’m feeling optimistic! If anyone else has any questions I’m willing to answer them :) thanks so much to everyone for being so kind.

The comments kept coming.

purpleraccoons wrote:

Honestly I'm not surprised that the owners had 0 idea how to run a business. A lot of people just think business owner = rich, and they want to make money stat without thinking of long-term sustainability and actual business-y things such as retaining a good clientele.

I once worked for a lady who decided to open 7 different branches of her company. At the same time. When she was just starting out. She was hemorrhaging money because each branch would only be open 1-2 days a week but she did it because she thought 7 branches = 7x the amount of customers.

Not to mention she refused to give me PPE when C-vid broke out and we were on lockdown. Yes, she made me come in to my non-essential job with zero PPE. I quit right then and there. I still don't know how her business is running today (albeit with 5 fewer branches).

WillBrakeForBrakes wrote:

My family did pretty well with their family business, but it also convinced me that I don’t ever want to be a business owner. My dad worked 11 hour days 5-6 days a week for years.

CreamPuffDelight wrote:

"Was I too hard on them?"

And my only thought was, excuse me? That's what you consider being hard on them? When even after resigning you kept trying to be nice and offer to do things for them?

SmartQuokka wrote:

I think we need to somehow find a way to teach every worker the axiom "never set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm."