I worked for the biggest Canadian chain and they’re awful. Got stuck with an assistant manager who was demoted from store manager for treating her staff like shit.

They thought it was a good idea to stick like 3 or 4 of those staff that quit back with her when they applied during a wave of expansion. She was awful. The store manager was good at first, you could tell she didn’t like the assistant. Things got bad enough for me to go to the DM since nothing was being done and it just felt like a good cop bad cop situation. The meeting I had was with a Sophia? I think and some other dude being TRAINED for DM (I had my BBA at this point and the best they could offer was temporary lowest ranking position with potential to be permanent part time. Full timers only got 25 hours a week… Absolutely insulting. Get a degree. There will be jobs…). They took the issues seriously. I was told to contact her again if there was any “retaliation”. When I left the office and closed the door they burst into laughter. It didn’t sound like uneasy laughter, it sounded like “what a fucking joke” laughter. They also shafted my good friend an assistant (different store I wanted to transfer to, and someone wanted to swap with me as it would be closer for both of us, but DENIED) - they offered her store manager but after she accepted they changed their minds! The DM in training ended up quitting, maybe he was looking for a more professional business!

Anyways a few weeks later after I was sure there was retaliation and not incompetence, I contacted the DM and she gaslight me. She said she never told me to contact her about retaliation. She fucking said there wasn’t anything wrong the AM did even though in the meeting she explicitly said she was doing SM stuff that as an AM she could only go to the actual SM and then get them to do it. I should’ve recorded the meeting! RECORD EVERYTHING, I swear, even if you have a good feeling about things or it’s not meetings about problems. If you live in a one party state, protect your ass.

I’m a survivor of narcissist abuse from family, friends, school etc and when it happens in the workplace I shut down, my anxiety goes thru the roof, I get panic attacks, fight or flight response, I have trouble speaking, so I do the only thing I can do - remove myself from the situation. I gave my notice and things were so uncomfortable I had to call in sick. Despite a nasty letter sent to me from the DM which was a blatant attempt to deny my EI, all I had to do was explain my situation to Service Canada, get a doctor’s note for my anxiety, and I got it. They mightve gotten off the hook as an employee because of the medical note though… It’s not just business that needs heavy reform but government as well.

She squinted at me and in all seriousness said, they shouldn’t be buying houses, they should be happy to buy food.

The sad thing is they honestly feel that way, and they’ll stand in six-hour lines to vote for it because they’re financially set and have nothing better to do.

24-hour news and social media have programmed them to honestly think that’s right. Fox News, FB, Twitter, and others have programmed their algorithms to keep people as outraged and angry as possible while also feeding them content to make them think all of their opinions are correct. (Keeps people clicking on ads.)

The sooner people divest themselves from corporate media or the sooner the Boomer generation dies off, the better society will be for all of us.

Old lady: My generation got a house for cheap, and over 40 years of grossly inflating the price of housing I’ll be damned to give up that imaginary value that grew in my mind and in the mind of my generation’s collective growing entitlement to a windfall of passive wealth.