Workplace reviews and discussion: 小樽手作珈琲有限公司

No pros.

If your mindset is to learn, I think you could stay. But if you are considering career advancement, salary, and benefits, it’s best not to have high hopes.

1. During the interview, they said overtime would be paid at the hourly rate for part-time workers. After I joined, there was no overtime pay, and I was forced to accept compensatory leave. Not to mention the three-holiday bonuses, performance bonus, and year-end bonus listed on the job website (let’s set aside the “depending on operating conditions” caveat)—none of them existed at all.

2. As soon as I joined, I discovered that all the experienced employees were about to leave. The staff shortage has continued ever since. There are seven stores in total, but only a little over ten full-time employees. The boss has no intention of hiring more full-time staff, believing that hiring too many would waste money and that part-time workers are more cost-effective. So you are constantly working all over the place. Store managers hardly get eight days off a month, and full-time employees are worked to exhaustion. Because there are not enough staff, taking compensatory leave is very difficult.

3. The company’s internal systems are extremely chaotic, and no one handles personnel matters. The boss hired some incompetent back-office staff who are ineffective and make decisions extremely slowly. The boss also disappears from time to time and cannot be reached, and has a habit of dragging things out.

4. The starting salaries for full-time employees are all somewhat different, and there is no standard for raises. During the interview, they said there would be a performance review every three months, but that never happened. I worked there for almost a year, and the company eventually established performance review standards. I took part and performed well, but the matter was eventually dropped without result.

5. After six months, the company hoped that you would take over as manager of a new store. Two months later, you would receive only a NT$1,000 raise, and your pay would still be lower than that of full-time employees who had just joined.