About three years ago I left the company. I came back 2 months ago and today was the first time it truly broke me.

I opened. I was scheduled two openers as it’s an order day and the next person in was 5am. I found out when I arrived that my second opener was sick and my 5am was scheduled outside there availability so I was now down two people.

For some background my store is high volume like 9 people on the floor still can’t catch up volume. Saturday’s are worse.

We start getting set up and my barista says one of the bars is giving her an error message. I check it do everything I can before calling it in. I get to my milk count to find the last order only came with two half and half’s. The next person in was around 7 them I had an 8 I ran tens when the seven came in and sent the 8 to the store to get milk. Then we got hit. Four people on the floor four lunches and we are up to our eyeballs in orders. The goth person comes in and I have to run lunches. This went on for the rest of the shift. We where down and as soon as we fought one thing up four more needed us. I had angry customers as we only had one bar and our numbers where half what they normally are.

Thankfully the repair person came and got our bar back. The problem came when we only had five people a cafe full of customers and a drive thru line wrapping the building.

Needless to say I had some very tired and unhappy baristas.

Now I am all for high volume. I love it it makes the time fly and you can have fun. The problem is when your so understaffed that the store burns around you. I felt bad for my baristas who worked there asses off. I felt bad for the customers who where fairly calm but had been waiting for a long time and I feel bad that I could not do more. My manager is on vacation and no one I called could come in.

I am writing this for two reasons, one I am mad, two I want to say thank you to all of the hard working baristas, shifts and store managers. It’s thankless and rough. I left and spoke to a barista who I have become close to I cried on the phone to her because I was so destroyed by how the day went. It has to get better but right now my faith in it getting better is gone. I saw the worse I fought the war and I lost. No the store did not burn but my will to do the job did.

Sorry for the long story I just did not know where else to write it.