I was hired on as the manager for one of the Godfather's Pizza stores. From the beginning it was nothing but challenges.
We struggled to find good employees. The office (Tri Group Management) would insist on approving every new hire. This wouldn't be as big an issue if they would actually get back to us in time, but often we would have to chase after them, call the office daily for weeks until they finally gave us the go ahead to hire certiain people. When it came to firing, however, we'd get phone calls from the office just days after someone started telling us that they were "no good" and we needed to get rid of them.
After two males were fired we were told "no more guys." We were only allowed to hire women.
We spent several months severely understaffed due to this. As manager, I would worked months without a day off, sometimes for 12 hours because there was no one else to run the store.
We were told to fire our only delivery driver because the people in the office didn't like the way she looked. We fought to keep her as she was good at her job and finding a replacement would be hard. Not to mention, a new pizza place had just recently opened in town. However, eventually the office gave us no choice and we were forced to fire her. When she got a job at the new place, and we lost business, we were told we "didn't fight hard enough to keep her" and that they were "extremely disappointed" that we let the driver get away like that.
The office would call to complain to me if they received and negative complaints, but ignored the many praises our store received. We were told to do whatever it took to make customers happy, but then would complain if we offered any freebies to any customer that had a legitimate complaint.
It was my job to take inventory each week and figure out our food costs. We started out very high when we first opened, but I got our costs down overall. However, if we had an off week where costs were higher than usual, I'd get an angry phone call from the office. One time one of these phone calls told me to "put less toppings on to make food costs go down" as well as "I'm getting a lot of complaints that there's not enough toppings on your pizzas. You need to make sure there are plenty of toppings. Just do it in a way that keeps food costs down." I
Our store had canned mushrooms, something many of our customers would complain about. When I brought this up to a representitive from the office I was told "The boss will never believe that people said that," thus shutting down my request for fresh mushrooms.
As a closer, I was often at the store late. We were often fairly steady near close, so cleaning up would take me past the closing time on several nights. However, I was never paid passed store hours. Even if I was there for an extra hour, I would only get paid for the time the store was open.
Eventually a new manager was brought in, and I was dropped down to assistant manager. However, no one from the office told me this. I found out through the grapevine that this new manager (assuming she was a co manager) was getting paid more than me, and when I questoned it I was told that I was, and had always been the assistant manager. However, I had been running the store as manager since the very beginning. For several months we only had 4 employees, myself included. During winter months, the people in the office would refer to me as manager. I figure this was just to avoid having to pay me more.
To make matters worse, it was revealed (by the people in question) that this new manager was related to someone in the office. As soon as she was brought in, things went from bad to worse. It was obvious this new manager was given the job based on her family status alone, as she was totally clueless in the job. Sales went down, food costs went up. I was asked to train this new manager. This was the final straw for me and I gave my notice. I was offered a raise and my manager status back, which to me only made it seem more redundant that I had been dropped down to assistant.
The store in question is no longer open. It closed shortly after I quit.