Employee meals provided

1. Life held hostage by Marugame:

A single store has over 20 people and 7 or 8 group chats: the full-time staff group, the full-time staff + part-time staff group, the cashier group, the tempura group, the tempura prep group, the soup-boiling group, and the soup prep group.

There are hundreds of messages every day, with constant notification sounds. Whenever someone says something, you have to reply “Received” immediately, and announcements are even posted at 2 a.m.

Hello, do you have nothing better to do?

Could the boss please get some proper sleep?

It’s fine if you don’t sleep in the middle of the night, but please don’t come out and scare people!

2. Life held hostage by Marugame, part 2

I never knew that working at an udon restaurant would require being on call just like an engineer!

They often call people who are off work at around 10 a.m. or 11 p.m., just to tell them there is trash on the floor or that something has been put in the wrong place.

Please don’t disturb people who are currently on vacation over things you could have handled yourself right then. Put yourself in their shoes, okay?

Whatever it is can wait until they’re back at work. Don’t act like a terrifyingly obsessive partner.

3. Thinking about it now, it feels completely absurd:

The stores have to be renovated every few years. The only time this happened to me (and the last time :)) was when the crew arrived right after we had just closed. The song from Shin Kong Mitsukoshi wishing you good night had barely finished, the greasy equipment had not yet been washed, the sales report had not yet been sent, and the store manager was still sitting in the office handling business when the wall beside us was literally torn down by the renovation crew. We had to rescue the pots, pans, and dishes amid the rubble.

The company did not provide any complete information about the process, the follow-up cleanup, or how to handle short-shelf-life ingredients. That day, we had to figure it out ourselves and transport several boxes of ingredients to other stores by pushing handcarts [taking taxis in the middle of the night].

I did not get home until 3 a.m. and had to start work at 9 a.m. the next day, while the company showed no concern whatsoever. (Full-time staff are considered to be under a responsibility-based employment system, so in addition to not receiving overtime pay, they also had to pay the full taxi fare themselves.)

Was it really that urgent? Had the company never discussed this with the renovation contractor?

On the final day of business, the crew only needed to put up a construction barrier around the work area. Couldn’t they have left one day as a buffer for the store to organize the equipment and ingredients, then started demolition and the actual construction that evening after everything had been sorted out? Wouldn’t that have been better?

5. Problems with responsibility allocation:

Many stores do not have a store manager. Regular full-time employees (assigned as acting store managers) are responsible for operating the store and bear all the responsibility, without any additional allowance, while being paid the salary of entry-level full-time staff.