全佑甘草芭食品有限公司

Interview:

The interviewer was very polite and explained everything quite clearly. For the clauses in the contract you had to sign, he basically went through them with you one by one and explained them slowly, and he also gave you the opportunity to ask questions.

Work

Pros:

1. Most of the senior employees are very nice and will teach you seriously. Although each senior employee has different ways of doing things and different sales pitches, they all ultimately lead to the same result. As long as you study seriously, they will not differ too much from the company's original SOP.

2. For employee training in Kaohsiung, you can receive the round-trip transportation costs immediately on the same day.

1. During the three-month probationary period, the base salary is NT$24,000, with another 4xx deducted for labor and health insurance. A mandatory NT$2,000 deposit is deducted for the employee uniform directly from your first paycheck. The NT$2,000 is returned if you complete three months, but not if you leave earlier. This is mentioned when they explain the contract during the interview. At the time, I thought, “Okay, go ahead and deduct it.” But after working for two weeks, when I actually received the uniform, it wasn't new. The uniform they gave you was the old green version, while the employees at their counters all wore blue uniforms. My immediate inner reaction was just, “You deducted NT$2,000 from me, and then gave me an old uniform!??!?!?!!?”

2. There is employee training, but I don't know why you specifically have to attend it at the Kaohsiung location. The work is basically exactly the same as in Tainan, and there is no special training that can only be done in Kaohsiung. So it makes you feel like you spent time traveling to Kaohsiung only to do the same things. The only explanation I can think of is that although this location is in Tainan, the supervisor who recruited me was in charge of the Kaohsiung area, so I belonged to the Kaohsiung area and therefore had to be trained by the Kaohsiung seniors~

3. I remember the website said the working hours were 10:30–22:00, which of course was impossible. The location was in a department store, and the department store held its morning meeting at 10:25. In the morning, you had to arrive early, at 10:00 or 10:10, to organize the counter. If you were late and missed the morning meeting, the counter would be fined, and whoever was on duty that day had to pay. So it was impossible to start work at 10:30. After work, you still had to close out the register, clean the back room, and handle various end-of-day tasks at the counter. Usually, you were the only person at the counter. If there were more customers, it was perfectly normal not to be able to start the closing tasks until 22:00, so don't expect to leave at 22:00. Of course, whether you left early or late was considered your own problem, and there was no overtime pay~

4. Starting on the Monday of their third week of employment, new employees were assigned to open the counter and hold the morning meeting by themselves. They were thrown into handling everything alone immediately. One new employee who started at the same time as me was still unfamiliar with the work and was hit by a customer with a partially eaten guava that day. No senior employee would come to the counter until the afternoon, so the new employee could only swallow his anger. That evening, the same new employee was publicly singled out and reprimanded by the boss in the company's LINE group. That employee also had a recurring problem with being late, and of course was eventually fired by the company even earlier than I was.

5. The scheduling system is incredibly exploitative: newcomers are treated like veterans, and veterans are treated like superheroes. Starting in their third week, new employees would be scheduled for consecutive Friday-to-Sunday shifts, three full days from 10:30–22:00. However, during the probationary period, no matter how many customers you served, you received no commission or performance credit. To earn performance-based pay, you first had to endure three months while earning 23xxx. On top of that, you were often the only person staffing the counter. So when customers kept coming, you would just feel that no matter how many customers came in, it had nothing to do with how much you earned. As a result, you wouldn't want to actively attract customers and would only end up more exhausted.

6. Because the company ultimately only wants one person staffing each counter, and at a department store you generally wouldn't want to leave the counter unattended for long, your meal break is limited. Although the Labor Standards Act stipulates that employees should receive a 30-minute break after four hours of work, here you are left to arrange it yourself. Of course, if you're bold enough, after telling the neighboring counter, you can also leave the counter unattended for 30 minutes and disappear. During an ALL shift, there is actually a total of one hour, but when it's a busy holiday and you're the only person at the counter, you can experience for yourself how rushed 30 minutes is. Naturally, it makes a big difference if another person arrives early and overlaps with your shift. But don't forget that the company mostly only wants one person at each counter. Not to mention that some seniors' shifts may sometimes start at 18:00, when there are the most customers. At that point, the veteran only wants to push their sales and won't care whether you, the newcomer, have taken your break. They happily chase their sales while the new employee struggles~

7. Even if you wanted to leave early before completing one month of work, you couldn't. I told the company in advance that I wanted to resign after working for about two more weeks, but the company contract states that if the schedule has already been posted and you do not work the scheduled hours, your pay will be deducted. Therefore, to avoid having wages deducted, you usually end up staying until the time listed on the schedule. Leaving early is very difficult.