Smooth Operators
I started university in 2004 and decided to look for a laidback weekend job to take care of the bills. Since my degree involved a lot of sitting around reading and writing essays, I thought I’d look for a job that didn’t require too much thinking and would get me off my bum. A new juice bar was opening in a shopping mall near my house, managed by a team of husband, wife and brother. They ran a tight ship, trying to ensure that their juice bar was the cleanest, fastest and cheapest to run in this whole mall. There were a few problems with this philosophy: “cleanest” involved having to be seen wiping down surfaces at any time that I wasn’t serving customers or preparing drinks. I would often find myself wiping down sparkling-clean benchtops because “you need to be busy all the time” even when we weren’t. “Fastest” was a problem because I was continuously told that everything I did wasn’t quick enough, despite my genuine efforts.
I found this out from my boss who took me aside to tell me she had been going up one level in the mall where there was a view of this juice bar and was watching us secretly to see what we did without supervision. And that brings us to “cheapest to run.” Some might say that flogging yourself as the highest-quality juice bar in a huge mall means maintaining certain standards, like using fresh fruit and ample amounts of actual ingredients (rather than making a drink out of 3/4 ice), but not my bosses. We were always encouraged to upsell, even to aged pensioners who would be more than happy with the much-cheaper kids-size smoothies (these cups were kept hidden from ordinary customers and left off the price list and could therefore only be ordered by mind-readers).
But the real kick to the junk? I had idly told T., one of my co-workers, in confidence, that I was thinking of looking for a better job. The next day, I got a call from my boss telling me that T. had passed on this sentiment to her. “If your heart’s not in it, it’s probably best that you don’t work for us anymore.” Ok, lady, you’ve got me there – my heart is not in the overpriced juice and smoothie business. A few months later I met up with a colleague (not the one who ratted me out) who told me that T. had been secretly pocketing a sneaky $50 at the end of most business days. A few months later, the store went into liquidation.
Ugh, I hate jobs where the bosses make you pretend to be busy rather than finding something real for you to do. I used to work as a cashier at a big box store and was constantly made to pretend to straighten up the candy in my lane, just to keep up the appearance of having a tidy store. This place sounds worse though.
Ugh…being busy for the sake of just looking busy is one of my biggest work pet peeves
Hey, the upside is you got to work in a mall. Probably next to a Sbarro’s?
You were being paid to do a job, so do the job. Even when you aren’t busy, you are still being paid so do something. I don’t see how that makes this job bad. And most jobs have video cameras where they monitor you, so her watching from the top floor doesn’t surprise me. If you were paying somebody to do something, wouldn’t you check in to make sure they were, in fact, doing it? As for the crappy ingridients – yeah, that sucks. But, ALL businesses do things like that. Every single restaurant cuts corners. And if you were going to leave anyway, I don’t see the harm in the boss telling you to just go so they can hire somebody who enjoys the job more. The person who sold you out sucks though.
Marie, being made to do “busy work” is demeaning, pointless, and a engineered image of the 50′s when we look back at it. In movie form, that is. If you have to act busy at your job, it’s because they are worried about every penny you take home. Who cares that the job is being done well, everyone is happy, customers served, they are not running around pretending to do something! I would care more about my employees, I never expect anyone that works in the boutique I hope to open someday, to pretend to be busy when they are not. I think it’s a tad insulting to my intelligence. We could be talking about something productive at the very least. But, go clean the clean tables? What does that do but give you a power trip?
I worked in a toy store like that, it was for some reason, in a low traffic area of the mall. So when we weren’t busy we had to straighten everything out. Even if it was already straight. We used to walk around the store pretending to straighten stuff up, because there was literally nothing else to do. I hated looking busy for the sake of looking busy.
MMMichelle is right on the money. There are posts on here with the OP complaining about having to do aspects that are a part of their job (like sweeping floors), but being made to do busy work when everything is already clean is insulting and catering to an out-dated sense of busy = productive.
it’s bullshit HR crap….they want people too look busy because it creates a good image that draws more business, etc. They sound like creeps but really no worse than most…however, T sounds like someone i’d beware of!