After a week of fucking around, hemming and hawing, pretending to plan and execute said plan, I finally got the news today. I am fired. We are all fired. Our jobs our gone.
It was, to say the least, a weird 3 months. I met people I liked, didn't particularly like, I had successes and failures, showed loyalty, threw away tons of my own beliefs, and still, I, and my coworkers, are out on our asses.
This story isn't particularly unique in a profit driven, capitalist system where the quest to get rich can bring people together, and tear them apart in an instant. Being washed in the vulture capitalist society can make a person and then three months later, thrash their little ship against the rocks of poverty.
When I was hired, there was no way I could know so many things would go south in the next three months, but somehow I had a feeling that there was something not right in this very small start-up business. I was initially intrigued by the job because the ad, and subsequent interview with the small business owners who had made themselves rich in the printer ink industry, because they promised purely performance based mobility within the company, and an ability to influence the purchasing decisions and management (meaning ultimately, the culture of the small start up if it expanded to, who knows, mid-sized in a year or two) of the small company. It seemed intriguing to me, because I wanted a job where I could offer honest, up front, smart "geek-based" customer service in the pre-paid wireless industry, which is quite infamous for being shady and screwing poor customers out of hundreds of dollars a bill cycle.
The promises made in the interview and subsequent training (if one could call it that) process did not measure up at all to the actual reality of the job. And, to be honest, about a month and a half into the job I started to feel quite slimey and slick, and that is just not the person I am. I don't mean to be so negative about this experience, I met a lot of good people who worked hard and tried their best to make this company turn a profit, but from the very fucking start, from the very beginning, we all knew this business was doomed to failure.
If this were a case where a small business owner screwed up because of inexperience, perhaps the circumstances surrounding the loss of my job would be acceptable. Ignorance of business practices and lack of savvy can often doom a start up business. But no, this was something far more insidious -- sheer mismanagement, aloofness, even tone deafness at the upper eschelons of ownership, conflicting messages, conflicting directives and lack of communication doomed this small company. And it wasn't from the employees. It was from the owners. Period.
These two guys became pretty successful businessmen in our medium sized city, and had the apparent savvy to navigate markets that hadn't brought them success before put me at ease a few weeks in when there were no customers. "Surely," I thought, "these two guys understand that a new name in the prepaid wireless industry in a very cynical market is going to take some time to generate some sort of profit." I know this from my education, which included some business classes. I thought that all successful start up people knew this simple fact. It takes time to grow a brand, especially in the wireless industry where the customer base is used to three big names. Its going to take hard work and honesty to build trust with the community. It takes providing the highest quality customer service to retain business and drive that word of mouth that builds the type of brand recognition they wanted. And from the very start of business, employees at this new start up were ham-stringed by novice mistakes that savvy, experienced businessmen, quite frankly, shouldn't make.
To be fair, there are three owners. One of them is in the wireless industry already and didn't agree with the other two about opening the two locations here. He actually researched, read the market, researched locations and is looking to strike out on his own in December (I am first on his call-back list, which makes me glad cause this guy isnt a flake). But the other two owners, the men who made their names right here in town, made a series of mistakes that, quite frankly, doomed this business from the very start. In the interview, the passed themselves off as self-made millionaires who were experienced and smart, knew what the hell they were doing. But their ACTIONS PROVED to me that they were anything but. They waved the fact that they made tons of money in my face and used it to imply that they were experienced and stable. And numerous times they assured that they knew that the business was going to lose money and not turn a profit immediately and that they had a plan. They assured us that business would pick up. They implied that they did their homework numerous times. They didn't.
First of all, the owners picked locations that were absolutely terrible for business. I mean, just awful. The first location they picked, the one I primarily worked at, had been a dead spot for as long as I could remember. Before my employment with this company, I just happened to live in the apartments across the street (we happened to move back to these same apartments a month ago, because we thought, hey great we've lived there before and its right across the street from my work. Little did we know that three weeks later I would lose my job and that location would be closed) and nobody had occupied the business for YEARS. I have talked to all of my neighbors, some of which have lived in these apartments for 20 years, and they don't remember anything being there before my business (and the other business that moved in a few months before mine did) opened up there. That means that this place has been all but ignored for YEARS and now, all of a sudden, these guys expect to open up and within 3 months sell 70 lines of service a month and turn a profit?! Its an absolute ridiculous expectation.
If they had actually like, ya know, did something professionally to this building to remodel it I could have actually seen this working. But this building was terrible, the landlord is an absolute slum lord, and was basically falling apart. The toilets didn't work, the building had a peculiar smell and the concrete foundation was lumpy and because it was lumpy the first time they did the floors (with cheap linoleum that looked like hardwood) it was so lumpy customers were tripping over it. It was just amateur hour all around.
Secondly, the store opened half stocked, with slow, glitchy, malware filled used computers from another prepaid wireless carrier from the area. There was absolutely no standardized training to speak of, so everyone received different information at separate times, and much of the training was self driven, meaning that training was absolutely uneven at best. Policies, rules, and procedures changed nearly hourly, scheduling was variable and you were on call, it was impossible for some employee to plan for their financial future. There were just tons of problems from the get go.
I spoke of abandoning my principles, and this has much more to do with the cell phone company we were dealing phones for. There were numerous training seminars they held at our locations, and what I heard there was just the most unacceptable, out-in-the-open and ridiculous class based bias I have ever heard in my life. I can't believe some of the shit that was said out loud in some of those trainings.
The pre-paid wireless industry is a "poor" industry and that is a well known fact. We cater to people with extremely bad credit, who can't go to the big three and the latest iphone or whatever for free (or very cheap) on their credit. We offer (or were supposed to offer) moderately priced, no-contract smart phones with substantial discounts to people who normally couldn't obtain these phones because they were too expensive. On its surface, it sounds like a pretty cool company. No contracts, no hidden fees, no upgrade fees, simple billing, pretty cool phones for like 20-100 bucks. I felt good selling them until the first training meeting.
In this meeting we were encouraged to use very slimey sales tactics to push phones out the door. Until this point, I had thought for a new cell phone company we were pulling down a decent amount of sales. This meeting wouldn't have effected anything if it hadn't become the new policy endorsed by the inept, ill prepared ownership wholeheartedly. And we lost business, and eventually, the business closed because of it. And I fought it every step of the fucking way, only to be shut up, told to sit down, and had someone who was hired 2 months after me promoted to sales manager when I had tons more experience at that job than he did. Because I wasn't a rubber stamp and spoke up when I felt like we were going the wrong path. Had they listened to me, it wouldn't have prevented the business from closing, but maybe we could have retained a bit more of our business, and hell, maybe sold more accessories than we did.
We were told to start embedding the price of cases in the phones -- ie bumping up the price of the phone 20 dollars and say to the customer "oh the case is free". Also, we were encouraged to inflate the price of accessories as much as 100 dollars and then "discount" to make it seem like we were doing the customer a favor. These weren't just sales advice, it was how they wanted EVERY customer interaction to go. We even changed our price cards to the "bundle" pricing which ended up being extremely confusing and obfuscating about the actual price of the phone. It became harder and harder to do my job and actually convince people to buy our phones and service. If you can't even tell them the truth about the PRICE of the phone, there is no way they will trust you enough to pay you every month for service.
But no, they all ASSUMED that poor people (code named "our demographic") wasn't smart enough to detect that there was something hinky going on with the price. They were all on "government programs" and could afford the hidden fees (while advertising no contracts, no hidden fees) that they embedded in the price of the phone to make up for the rebates we gave out for them. They assumed they were stupid, didn't do research, and pigeon-holed them into some of the most ridiculous class based set of assumptions I have ever read (called "customer types"). I hated this job, truly, truly hated it.
But, to be honest, I was willing to do it. I was willing to put up with it all, sell out my recent education in sociology and critical thinking for a minimum wage job, to pay my bills, to survive until I could actually go to grad school and make something of myself. And these guys, at the first sign of losing some money, cut and run on all of us. Leaving 8 employees without a job, without a call, without an apology, without so much as a thank you for your effort.
I did some things at this job that were embarrassing and degrading, and were the exact reason I went back to school to avoid. I dressed up like a giant used andriod that was originally from another wireless carrier but we decided to tack a ripped shirt with our branding on to it. I went out and waved a sign around like a damn idiot to try to drive some sort of business into this place. I tried to sell phones their way, and got caught more times than I could count.
Even worse, by not speaking up against those biased assholes both at our company and at the corporate level, I abandoned my principles. For money. And lost my job all the same.
And now I find myself again washed on the shores of poverty, my fiancee's steady job the only thing between us and moving back to her parents house for a third time. Luckily I had the foresight to start looking for jobs weeks ago, because I knew something was coming. But the worst news is that I don't qualify for unemployment, I needed 500 hours with my employer and I only had 390. So, I am on a timer to find work: If I can't find work by the end of October, we're sunk. We can juggle things around until then, but thats the deadline.
Here's hoping I can do it. I busted my ass with this company, I would love to bust my ass for another one.