Store employees can get a 20% discount.

After working four hours, you are provided with one meal—so small it barely fills your stomach or even gets between your teeth—and then you have to keep working while still hungry, because the break is “20 minutes of staggered rest per person.”

So there is basically no time to get anything else to eat.

Hmm, it looks like a disadvantage disguised as an advantage :)

I was hired as a part-time store employee. Later, I had an argument with the store supervisor after we disagreed, and the store manager abused their position by scheduling me for two and a half months of leave by myself. The district manager and area manager simply turned a blind eye, intending to force me to quit and resign voluntarily. But they did not expect me to be stubborn enough not to resign. They still had to pay my labor and health insurance, and because I had not worked even ten hours in the entire two months, the company also had to cover the employee-paid portion (although the employee-paid portion was only a few hundred dollars).

Later, HR could not stand by and watch anymore, so they called me to headquarters under the pretext of having a discussion, when in reality they wanted to trick me into signing an agreement to accept termination. If I signed it, I would only receive a small severance payment.

I proposed a severance amount (all based on documented and verifiable figures—not an exaggerated amount like the one- or two-million-dollar alimony claims sometimes seen in the news). HR later said they did not have the authority to approve it, so I said I would go to labor-management mediation. It did not matter whether they agreed or not: if mediation succeeded, I would receive more; if it failed, it would still be worth trying.

That said, how much severance could a part-time employee who had only worked for a few months really get? Add to that the pitifully low number of hours during the pandemic, and the severance was even more meager. However, I had signed a labor contract before starting work that guaranteed a certain number of hours. Young college students in their early twenties who take part-time jobs generally do not pay attention to contracts: someone puts a piece of paper in front of you and tells you to sign it, so you sign it.

But since the company had violated the Labor Standards Act first, it had to compensate me with more severance than usual.

Still, the job depends on what kind of coworkers you encounter, so you cannot unfairly dismiss the entire company based on one case. But after meeting HR, I believe Louisa Coffee is, from HR down to the store managers, undeniably a company that is rotten beyond repair. When a company is riddled with this many toxic employees, you can probably tell what kind of quality its owner has.