Me and my girlfriend work for Starbucks. I’m 19 and she is 18. She has worked at the same store for nearly two years and me one. We live together as well and our lives have literally turned upside down.

It started at the beginning of this year when hours started getting cut. I went from getting 25 to 30 hours a week to getting about 15 to 20, which wouldn’t be bad but I do have health insurance so that was kicking my ass. My girlfriends hours also got cut. So with both of our hours getting cut, we were getting behind on bills.

We started getting little side jobs here and there to help out but it wasn’t as much as we were making with Starbucks. I went to our store manager several times asking for more hours even if it was 2 to 5 more a week. She kept promising that they would go up but as the weeks past they just kept getting lower and lower.

At this time, I was working a lot of jobs so sometimes I would be like three minutes late to work and around the third time my store manager wrote me up for it, which I felt was unfair because a lot of other baristas were late as well even though I told her my situation.

My girlfriend asked for more hours and she got more for like two weeks but then it went down again. We kept going back to our store manager and asking and she kept promising but nothing ever happened.

So when June hit that’s when things got hectic. Me and my girlfriends apartment flooded and we lost a lot of things. On top of that our apartment complex wouldn’t come out to fix it because they suck so we had to wait a couple days for them to clean up the water. We had to call into work a lot due to this and our store manager said she understood but we would hear from other people that she said we were lying about the flooding and just didn’t want to come in.

Mind you, me and my girlfriend rarely called off and we were relatively good employees so when we heard about this we were highly upset. My girlfriend got tired of the bullshit and eventually she confronted our store manager. Our store manager ended up saying very hurtful things to my girlfriend and she ended up quitting.

A couple of weeks later I ended up getting extremely sick due to the mold in our apartment so we started living in a hotel. I told my store manager these details but she just didn’t care.

This last week she sat me down and basically fired me in front of the entire store. I’m a bit shocked with how things turned out and I’m not sure what to do. I guess I’m just wondering if anyone else had any similar experiences. Thanks for taking the time to read.