Eh. My school's having an Open House that would've been nice to go to on Friday, but I'm not quite willing to give up a 6.75 hr shift. Erg.

So what am I doing up 'til 4 am on a school night? Stupid homework. Well, it's done. (They better not trash it!) But the worst part? I didn't do the homework for the other class! Argh! Sigh, well, I get a half-hour break between classes.

It felt really good to have someone else be frustrated with our store as much as me. It's been getting busy lately (I think maybe due to the time change cuz there seems to be more people out), and every time I've closed we've been busy right up to closing time. In fact, we had to kick people out. Good for business, I guess, but that just means that it takes us longer to clean up afterwards. So the lead I closed with tonight and last Sunday was the same lead, and she was just promoted not too long ago. But they've been totally on her case cuz of the hour overages. And the reason why? Cuz management gets a bonus for not going over too many hours. (For those of you that don't know what "hours" are, basically, there's some formula to figure out how many people were needed to work however many hours that day based on that day's sales. So when it's slow, the leads are supposed to send us home early. Well, you can see what the problem is. Slow times come in spurts. You can't have extra people work in 15-min shifts.)

My manager's trying to get everyone to "take ownership of the store." Meaning, we should want to work as hard as we can as fast as we can to make our store the best store in the world. But it's hard to take ownership of a store when you don't get any benefits from working harder. I worked my @$$ off and didn't get a raise, they cut my hours, and we had fewer people working when it was busy. And what do we get for it? More tips? Hah! More wages? Double-hah! We get a promise of a pizza party for good mystery shopper reports. Ooooooh. A pizza party. Like that'll pay my bills. There's a reason why a lot of companies offer profit-sharing. But since we don't see any of the manager's bonuses, I don't see any logical reason to work any harder. I mean, if they were at least honest and admit that they need the money and could we please help 'em out, well, that I can at least respect. None of this phony-baloney "we're in this together" crap.

(On a side note, Starbucks does offer stock grants, but that's dependent on the successes of the company as a whole. And it's a pretty rich company. I doubt our store makes a dent in their total profits.)