There are often discarded items available to eat

1. The boss treats employees extremely poorly

I heard from senior colleagues that the boss used to perform very well while working abroad. In addition, he founded this brand from scratch, so he thinks he is extremely capable. However, from an employee’s perspective, he has become extremely arrogant. If you encounter him without smiling, bowing, and saying hello, he gets very angry and will directly berate employees loudly in the store. (Because of this, the store manager once gathered everyone at the store during working hours to lecture us, so that the boss could see on the security cameras that we were taking the matter seriously.)

2. Employees are exploited severely, and the store manager also endorses this company culture

To give the most outrageous example: once, the head office called to tell us, “The pastry chef got a nosebleed while making cakes,” and asked us to check whether any of the products delivered to the store had been contaminated with blood.

The store manager herself once worked so hard that she was hospitalized for a month, but because the boss expressed concern, she still thought the boss was very good.

Once, halfway through a workday, the company announced that the afternoon would be a typhoon holiday. The company actually said that the remaining hours had to be made up. But because company policy prohibited working less than a full shift, this effectively meant the company took extra hours from us without compensation. The store manager thought all of this was perfectly reasonable and considered complaints unacceptable and excessive.

Full-time employees who speak Japanese or Korean receive a foreign-language allowance, but part-time employees do not (and their hourly wage is the same as that of part-time employees who do not speak Japanese or Korean, with no additional pay). Yet whenever Japanese or Korean customers came in, or there was a television interview, the work was pushed onto the part-time employee who spoke Japanese (because the full-time employee had resigned). Moreover, we were only told on-site at the last minute that we would appear on television, and we were not paid any appearance fee afterward.

3. The manager is emotional and lacks the ability to assess the store’s operating situation

Because the store is in a tourist area, there is never a shortage of customers, and on holidays they come continuously. In addition to sales at the counter, there is also dine-in service. Sales often involve customers purchasing many gift boxes at once (even the box inserts have to be assembled on-site), while dine-in service requires someone to go upstairs every five minutes to refill customers’ tea.

The store is also three stories tall and has no dumbwaiter, so delivering food, clearing tables, providing tableside service, and so on all require employees to constantly climb the stairs. Because employee turnover is extremely high, the store is almost always understaffed, and we usually worked alongside new hires. You can imagine how terrifying it was whenever there were many customers.

However, despite interviewing many people, the manager simply refused to hire them. Even those who were hired usually quit after only one or two days. The manager would only transfer staff from another brand owned by the company, but since it was a completely different brand and store, they were effectively new employees. Nevertheless, the manager still considered each transferred employee equivalent to one full employee (when they really only counted as 0.5 of one!!!)

In addition, the manager showed extreme favoritism, and her standards were based entirely on her own feelings, unrelated to work performance. If she liked someone, she liked them; if she did not, she showed absolutely no mercy. Whenever the manager was not working, she would assume that the day’s sales were terrible, even when sales were lower on days she had worked the previous day. She also often dumped her own work on others, always saying she was busy. If she made a mistake, she would simply laugh it off, but if anyone else made a mistake, she would become furious.

There is really too much to list... but these are the only things I can think of at the moment.

In short, this is a company that will immediately shatter your illusions once you join. The company culture is extremely strange, and turnover at the head office, individual stores, and warehouse is extremely high. When I had only been there for two or three months, I was already the most senior employee. Apart from the manager, everyone, including the full-time employees, had joined after me. There were also countless people who came for just one day and never returned.