asked for a raise (im the only employee at a small cosmetics company. i handle the manufacturing, labeling, packing, and shipping, as well as keeping up inventory and keeping the place in order. basically everything) and my boss responds by trying to gaslight me, pulling this “we’re a small business 🥺” bullshit
he just bought a 60,000 dollar car and is taking his second vacation of the year next week
he keeps trying to hold “a week of personal time” i had to go on strike by myself to earn, “paid winter break” etc over my head. all shit that the government forces you to give your employees in every other country on the planet. america is a shit hole with no workers rights and it allows the parasitic small business tyrant class feel like they’re doing something good by offering the bare minimum. literally “i treat my slaves nicely” shit
sorry yall just wanted to rant. fuck america and work under capitalism
small business tyrants are the worst. the ones who pull shit like “i can’t afford an extra $120/week” while living in luxury, taking vacations, and making you do everything are total “don’t believe your lying eyes” type of psychos. i hate how common it is.
i have managed to rat fuck 1 or 2. the sweetest plum is to secretly find other work while pretending you have become complacent about your job and time it so you can ghost their asses right as you are needed most. it is very easy to lull these people into security, because they think they are genius masterminds already. meanwhile, they flail hard when you take all the knowledge of processes and critical relationships and walk with zero notice. don’t delete files or destroy property, but maybe don’t be so great about keeping records or whatever for the last week once your new gig has a start date. whoops! doing a crappy job isn’t illegal!
only ever give them a single sentence in reply when they ask where you are on that first day you’re doing the new job, preferably as text something like “i am pursuing a different professional opportunity, best of luck.” and then never say anything else, no matter what. i recommend disabling notifications from them. they will 100% have a narcissistic meltdown, blow up your phone, and hopefully text a shitload. all that stuff can be shared on socials, you can make reviews on google and glassdoor absolutely smearing the place with links to the texts they will send trying to bully you.
it really doesn’t take much to poison the well against recruiting future employees if you’ve got a few texts of them being abusive, which this sort of gambit is certain to cause in this type of employer.
probably my only real advice for this to anyone wanting to replicate it is to temper your expectations on finding a better job. it’s probably not gonna happen in a week, but if you only apply for a new job once every week or so, that’s a reasonable tempo to keep up. and it’s weird the way jobs pop up randomly, so the longer period of time you’re looking is a better search than trying to find all the available jobs in a short window of time. and you’ll be in a strong negotiating position, because you already have a job, so you won’t have to accept something that sucks. it’s a slow burn revenge. the wise fear the anger of the patient.
anyway, i hope you get a chance to stick it to this shit wizard.
lol not really a “small business”, but I worked at Best Buy before I could find work in my field, and the onboarding was aggressive in reminding you that they’re an “at-will employer”. Which is what I reminded them when I showed up for my shift to inform them I wouldn’t be doing it or any others. ✌️
this is a great comment and i appreciate all your advice, thank you comrade
I’m going to go against the grain here and say DO NOT QUIT.
First you need to copy every spreadsheet and every document they have for your new startup. That and their list of contacts on Salesforce if you have it/they use it. You don’t have to use their docs etc it’ll just come in handy having them as reference when you redo the work yourself because you can literally do the job this company is doing as 1 person.
Should take a week or so. Make sure you’ve got everything. Do not pass up anything, you’ll regret it later.
If there wasn’t a noncompete agreement, you don’t even need to quit until you’re sure your clone of their company is working out.
Yes. Copy their database.
In the US you can buy mailing lists and just start emailing people who haven’t consented or opted in to your communications. You can export their whole list and start emailing them and there’s nothing the contacts can do about it.
Do it at work because some programs track those events and the IP address of where it happened.
Also, create your own website and add your own Meta tracking pixel to their website. That way their customers become yours to market to, and their like audiences become yours as well.
Do you have an affiliate marketing program? Sign up and add your own tracking to all the links in ads and emails. That way you can get some sweet commission on top of your regular pay to fund your new venture.
If you don’t have the means to start from scratch, look at places like Asian Beauty Mart where maybe you could start drop shipping cosmetics to get going then do your own shit.
I would say don’t even quit after you’ve done all that. Build your base while working there. You can easily get supplies from them. They sound so checked out.
I’ve known people that have gotten busted doing that. Minus stealing supplies. They got sued and lost. After the fact is fine as long as you don’t have a noncompete, but if you do it while still employed you risk losing your whole biz.
Move fast though bc I guarantee they’re already thinking about how to replace them
sadly i dont have access to spreadsheets and documents but i do know the names of most of the stores we sell to by heart so i could easily come up with a list of potential clients if i ever decided to go that route
Get the access. Then leave. What timeline might be involved in that? 3-6 months? I bet you can invent a creative reason to get access and “help”.
lol you’re right, if i framed it as myself taking on more work he would give me access probably
“sorry, i can’t afford to pay you more (i enjoy my luxurious lifestyle you’re supporting)” -
exactly. he literally said i “have assumptions about how much he makes”
i quite literally have no concept of how much he makes, but i have eyeballs and i can see his lifestyle that my labor allows him to live and i can see my empty ass cabinets
Seriously though, $60,000 car and one employee?
yeah they make bank because the product has low cost to produce and a high profit plus only one employee (my dumb ass) facilitating every step of the process
Why not just quit and work for yourself doing the same thing and make all that money for yourself?
FR. Since you’re running their business for them already it should be relatively straight-forward. Easy enough to find out who their suppliers are, given I imagine you probably manage shipping and receiving as well. Accounting you may have to learn a thing or two, but nothing you can’t figure out. Fuck these leeches.
the initial investment it would take prevents me
i know the formula and the manufacturing process- which we’re the only company with this process. i could use basic kitchen equipment to replicate the product but its the initial cost of the ingredients. if i could afford that initial cost, assuming i could actually sell the product it would become profitable very fast tho
I would try to find a friend and start a co-op, to lessen the burden. Or if you know the start up capital costs, go to a bank and get a business loan. You can literally explain that you know the entire business and that will allow them to get their beaks wet on something that has already been proven to be a profitable enterprise, they love that kind of backdoor bullshit. The only thing stopping it is if they own a patent or copyright in the actual product.
there are small business loans that are usually cheap govt backed programs
Do you live close to any of these places?
https://seedcommons.org/our-network
Because this is exactly the sort of thing that this org aims to do, to give people like you the startup capital to enter the market.
I would start making a list of all your customers and that way, if you do go for it, you can take that business with you (or at least attempt to). If you do it, I would quit when your boss is on vacation to fuck them over even harder.
Start stealing it and sell it on ebay
sadly not a good plan. i had initially planned to do this when i first started working here to get some side money but this dude is neurotic and scowers the internet to find people possibly selling knockoffs of the product or selling it unauthorized or anything
Sounds like a dope-ass margin. Or tax evasion. Could always be tax evasion.
just big margins. an ingredient order is placed about every 6 months. the product is just made with various oils and waxes. while the order will costa few thousand dollars, in one day i produce thousands of products all of which individually sell for enough that one day of production will easily pay for an entire 6 month’s worth of ingredients.
on that note, his wife accidentally fucked up once and gave me an order that didnt have the prices removed, so i could see what they sell everything for and the total amount of the order. one medium-small sized order i ship out pays for my entire month’s salary. im packing dozens upon dozens of these orders every month, with some larger ones that will likely be about a year’s worth of my salary coming in every couple months
let me guess, they tell everyone how they started a business by themselves and they work really hard as a independent entrepreneur. they hustle, they grind, they strive. they created a brand and watched it grow.
yes. he loves to tell the story about how he worked tirelessly to come up with the formula for the brand and always says he “looked like a mad genius” scribbling his formula so many times to tweak it ☠️
Sounds like he ended up in a situation where 100% of his employees are irreplacable, aware of it and radicalized against him. Pretty sure that’s one of the pages in the Big Book of Business where you’re supposed to draw a frowny face and (if you can) write “No”.
Not really.
It sounds like the boss is saying he can find someone else to do this for $17 an hour.
that is what he’s saying, but he would quickly realize that’s not true once i left. to be honest im not sure be even believes it to be the case- the few people he’s brought in didn’t even last a year on the longer end because he’s so neurotic and the pay to work ratio isnt there. then all the work those people were doing just falls back on me and i make the same amount i always did.
he wants to pay teenager wages for adult work. the reason i’m even still here is because ive been here for almost 10yrs, its the job i got when i first moved back to the country and was rooming with my sibling and our friend, so my rent was like 200/mo at the time. i was okay with the lower pay because the lax structure made it worth it for me since i didnt need much money anyway. 10yrs later, im essentially running his warehouse and he’s still basically paying me the same. a teenager’s wage. he wont find an adult to come in and do this job for 17/hr, i know that for a fact. and no teenager can handle this job, i also know that for a fact.
so im not sure if he really believes that or is saying it as a bargaining chip
If you’re essentially running the warehouse, there should be lots of data you can get your hands on, about how much is getting shipped out (which you can then use to compute the conpany’s gross revenue).
Learn everything you can, while you have the opening to: the better picture you have of the company and its trade secrets, the more leverage you have in negotiating, and the easier it ends up being to duplicate their business if you want to go for that option.
Yeah. I don’t mean this in a condescending or dismissive way, but this is a story as old as time, and your choices are the same as they have ever been.
You’ve been negotiating so you can either negotiate more firmly or find another job.
Certainly from everything you’ve said it does sound like this guy is happy to take advantage of you if you’ll allow him to do so.
To put it more specifically it sounds like he’s betting on your reluctance to find another job.
Yeah, but if you read the Big Book of Business you will find that telling your employees that they are irreplacable and hold all the cards in a negotiation also gets a frowny face. If it was easy to replace them why did the boss cave to a one person strike the first time?
Quit now and fuck up their vacation if you can. They’re parasites.
problem is if i quit i cant collect unemployment. my plan is to say ill accept 17/hr and step down from manufacturing since thats a big job and should be paying a lot more
if he says no to that then im going on strike when they’re on vacation and also joining all of the niche facebook groups where our customers come from and let them know how this “cruelty free” company views worker pay
“Cruelty free” only applies to animals, silly. People aren’t animals. They’re just the objects I use to get my next $60,000 car and my second “vacation” since January for all the “hard work” I do.
From one animal to another: You already run their show. You see all those shipping manifests when you receive ingredients. Might be time to cut the fat and just run your own show.
Just don’t do your job while they’re on vacation
considering it. my fear is that i live in an at will employment state as it is, and in blompf’s america on top of that. im paranoid if i get fired the government is gonna suddenly decide the unemployed don’t need help (even the crumbs they’re getting now) and then im back out on the streets. i have a sibling which counts on me to collect a paycheck as well because we split bills so i dont want to risk putting them in a bad situation.
shit like this is how capitalism keeps workers oppressed. you’re not a free person. you live in a system that’s against you and you have to try and survive it which sadly means a lot of the time you cant do what you know you should (not work while your boss is on vacation)
you hold all the cards here. find another job (not necessarily right away but start looking) that you could tolerate and tell him you’re gonna bounce if he doesn’t bump you up to $25/hr.
if you have another job offer in hand you can really turn the screws on him, especially since you know the business is profitable enough (that $60k car could have been an additional $30/hr to you over the course of a year, assuming you work 40 hours a week). so ask for a huge raise because the number can only go down during negotiations, not up
then go back to looking for jobs but use your shiny new hourly rate as a baseline for negotiating with other employers and leave your current boss in the lurch, ideally as quickly as possible after winning the negotiation.
get his ass. show this dipshit no mercy, it’s not half as bad as what he’d do to you if he could
awful
hope your boss dies a violent and painful death ❤️
lmaoo thank you comrade. im thankful for this community. most places i made a post like this, it would just be a bunch of boot lickers and peons saying “well you get paid time off! what more do you want! 16/hr isnt bad! its HIS business!!”
Reminds me of an ex sitting in the ER getting blown up by his bosses with a yacht, gated community, private school for their kid, wanting him to return to work the same day the boss mashed him up with heavy equipment. Tfooh.
i hate these people so much. the entitlement of these greedy pigs just blows my mind. i have no sympathy for any of these people.
The sad part is, he went back the last couple of hours.i believe he was making $10/he at the time.
I remember that Lenin story about him sending university students to help farmers by shooting their kulaks. I wont see the end of capitalism in my lifetime but I can’t imagine the jubilation of having true political power over these parasites.
Not even $20 an hour for a manufacturing job? Surely you can find something better than that.
i probably can yeah. the lax environment has kept me here. im allowed to call out whenever i want so long as it doesnt hold up the business, and i have a lot days where im too depressed or anxious to go to work. i dont get paid for those days but knowing i can take off without getting all the guilt tripping and the threats of being fired is one of the few reasons ive stayed
Rich snobs unironically give actual poor people this look in this day and age.
BRB moving to Italy and finding an oceanfront property in Naples and tell both the immigration agency and any landlord that I don’t feel like paying a dime, but I should receive those things anyways because it would be nice of them to.
