We’re not rude, we really try our absolute best. Our store is in a busy area, we get 900+ customers a day and we are rarely staffed with more than four people at a time. The job is becoming hell. We used to have 7-8 people on the floor, but our manager is (I think) trying to save money and now we are constantly swamped, understaffed and overworked.

(Our SM only staffed us appropriately the one time the DM was coming to visit.)

We’re being coached on customer connection every day when the problem is that none of us have even even half a second to connect with customers when there’s one person on POS, two people on bar, and 15 customers in line plus mobile orders and delivery orders. Some baristas were never even trained well enough to help us on bar so even if we have like 5 people on the floor, two people will be relegated to solely CS, POS, or warming.

I feel crazy. We’ve been having meetings about customer connection but the root of the problem is never addressed. Idk what to do. There’s never a second to breathe and yet we can never be good enough in the eyes of our SM and DM. They blame the baristas, they act like we don’t try hard enough. On top of that, we are expected to be kind and put-together after being yelled at by customers every day multiple times a day while 20 minutes behind on orders. How are we supposed to raise our score if we’re already doing the absolute best we can?

Three barista including myself had anxiety-induced mental breakdowns at work in the last two weeks. It shouldn’t be like this. It’s just f*cking coffee.