Workplace reviews and discussion: 珍食堡實業股份有限公司

You don’t have to take a company phone number; you can choose a NT$500 phone-bill subsidy instead.

NT$2 per kilometer for motorcycle fuel reimbursement.

You can play with dogs and cats while visiting clients—the only emotional consolation.

This company sells pet food. It is Taiwan’s largest local pet-food company with its own brand.

The boss treats sales staff very poorly and builds himself up by deducting money from employees.

Base salary: NT$27,000 + NT$1,000 perfect-attendance bonus.

After deducting labor and health insurance of NT$1,063, the actual take-home pay is NT$26,937.

Bonuses are settled quarterly and paid every March, June, September, and December. It somewhat effectively binds you to keep working there.

Sales staff have no office and do not clock in or out.

There is a video meeting from 9:00 a.m. Monday through Friday to practice sales scripts. It lasts about half an hour, but sometimes drags on for an hour.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the boss appears in the meetings. He only emphasizes that sales must push, push, push, but he really likes deducting money from sales staff.

Because of the nature of the industry, it is not recommended to visit clients right after they open: store staff need to organize the store, check and shelve inventory, and clean up dog and cat feces and urine.

The company does not require clocking in or out and emphasizes flexible working hours for sales, but treats the phrase “flexible working hours” as meaning you must be on call 24 hours a day.

You are expected to work Monday through Sunday. The company will bombard you with work messages.

Muting notifications is useless. The work group uses tags, so the sound alerts still pop up.

A two-day weekend is effectively nonexistent. If a partner store opens on a holiday, the sales representative for that area is taken out by a supervisor to hold a sampling event.

Every month, accounting gives you an Excel file to fill out yourself. You must record that you started work before 8:30 a.m. each day and write down that you finished after 5:30 p.m.

It is outright falsification of documents. Really great.

I personally received work messages as early as around 5 a.m. and as late as midnight.

You must deal with client matters immediately after the video meeting ends, because LINE exists.

If it is the end-of-month collection week, you must immediately go to the bank to deposit the payment collected for yesterday’s deliveries.

There are constant work messages even during your lunch break.

After lunch, you start visiting clients, and the messages remain nonstop.

You keep working until 8 or 9 p.m., and then you still have to enter that day’s orders yourself.

Orders are also forcibly required to be entered at night because you must write a daily report every day; one tab requires you to export an order Excel file from the company system and paste it in.

If you take sales seriously, prepare to work yourself to death. The more stores you visit, the more time you spend, the more tasks you have, and the more orders you get.

Every day, from the moment you open your eyes until you lie down, they work you to the bone.

The company has spoiled a bunch of terrible customers.

They do not dare offend chain stores. After the other party orders goods, receives and checks the delivery, and regrets it, they can make a fuss about returning two flavors, and the company accepts it.

For returns, NT$300 is deducted from the sales representative’s year-end bonus, and the sales representative is responsible for the shipping costs.

Some customers still bombard you with question marks after midnight, asking when the goods will arrive.

Some customers ask you to go collect a check only at night, do not prepare the check in advance, and require you to do miscellaneous tasks before they are willing to pay you.

You start work at 9 a.m.; a customer only wants to pay you at 9 p.m. After going home, you still have to enter orders. Ha ha.

There are several types of bonuses:

1. Designated-brand promotion month: the top seven by sales performance receive bonuses of NT$20,000, NT$15,000, NT$10,000, NT$8,000, NT$6,000, NT$4,000, and NT$2,000.

The first-place prize is NT$20,000. It is downright laughable: after working yourself to death like this, why bother for only an extra NT$666 a day?

There are also piles of thresholds, making it feel like direct selling. You need sales of NT$600,000 plus product placement in 35 stores (the number differs each month; if the company feels like it, it will change it to 45 stores)

before you can get a “ticket to the competition.”

There are no replacements if a position is unfilled. If only three sales representatives meet this ridiculous threshold, an official notice will say that the remaining four places are unfilled, and no money will be paid.

The company’s sales department usually has around 20 people coming and going.

Using 20 as the basis, 13 sales representatives will be there merely to fill out the rankings, with no bonus.

Then each of the bottom three sales representatives receives one demerit, with NT$300 deducted from each.

Each of the supervisors of those three sales representatives also receives one demerit, with NT$300 deducted from each.

That way, they can pay out the seventh-place bonus.

The company has its own factories in Sanchong: Vietnam Plants 1 and 2.

Whether you work in sales, the office, or the factory, mistakes result in a NT$300 deduction—or they find a reason to deduct money from you.

The total prize money for the sales competition is only NT$65,000. Put bluntly, they deduct money from their own people here and there, then pass it back with the other hand; the boss has not paid out a single cent of his own money.

2. Designated-item placement bonus: NT$3,000 for 45 stores. They even shamelessly say that this month is special and that 35 stores will earn NT$2,000—it is “easy money.”

Ten fewer stores gets you only NT$1,000 less, or NT$100 per store. That is not enough to cover the time cost of developing clients; the basic hourly wage is already NT$160, okay?

Also, the monthly closing date is the 25th. In other words, after excluding Saturdays and Sundays, you have only 15 days—three weeks—to visit clients.

No wonder so many people cannot achieve it. If you want to reach the target, work overtime by yourself on Saturdays and Sundays. The boss gets free labor and slaves—yay.

3. Sales bonus: “more than 1%.” That’s right—the company simply tells you “more than 1%,” so you have no idea what the exact percentage is.

Sell NT$1 million and you can receive a little over NT$10,000. Paid once every three months, that gives you a little over NT$30,000.

For the amount of labor this company demands, just a little over NT$30,000 is truly pitifully little.

4. Year-end bonus: one month’s salary. Over the course of the year, the company will find all kinds of reasons to give you demerits; each demerit deducts NT$300.

See how much of your year-end bonus can be deducted. Ha ha.

The company is very clever: instead of deducting your base salary, it deliberately uses the year-end bonus to evade the issue and exploit you for an entire year’s labor, because the legal rules on year-end bonuses are ambiguous.

In court, it becomes a matter of the judge’s personal discretion.

Some judges think that workers who have worked hard all year must receive it and cannot have it deducted.

Other judges think that a year-end bonus is not a fixed, regular payment, so withholding it is not illegal.

The boss counts on most people being too much like slaves to sue in court. Even if they do sue, he is not afraid of losing; at worst, he pays you one month’s money and tells you to get lost.

Even during the pandemic, employees were required to participate in pet exhibitions and go to crowded places. Poor workers are treated like livestock by the employer.

The company hired sales assistants, but they do not enter orders and love shirking work—if they can avoid doing something, they avoid it.

Assistants act as if they outrank sales staff; when you ask about something, they demand an answer immediately.

When there is business coordination to handle, the assistants pretend not to know. As soon as a supervisor above them asks, they answer immediately. They are just throwing their weight around.

Sales staff spend the day exposed to the sun and rain, and after returning home exhausted, still have to do a pile of paperwork until midnight. Make one mistake and they deduct money.