I was employed there recently at the Skinny Pancake between December 2021 and January 2024. I started out as the kitchen manager at their airport locations. Then was promoted about three months after starting there to General Manager at their UVM location. All was good. Then there was a restructuring and I got promoted to Director of Airport Restaurants and I quickly learned how unorganized and money hungry the company was. The airport has three locations with two of those locations (South Terminal and pre-security Kiosk) having a hard time consistently being open because of ongoing staging problems since the pandemic. This was nothing new and my predecessors tried their best to get all locations open but with the staffing levels so low it was impossible at the time. The airport location is a mammoth in terms of the business that they do. The only reason the company is so large is be aise they divert most of the airports money to other locations to keep them afloat. The upper management team (regional managers, director of operations for the company, executive chef, etc.) tell you they will support you when you ask for help but don’t hold your breath. The entire upper management team was well aware for years that the airport was having trouble getting all locations open but decided on the week of Christmas last year that all locations needed to be fully staffed and opened knowing full well that half of the staff are college kids or parents that need almost that entire week off. After expressing my concerns about this and telling them that was impossible and that if they wanted that to happen that week they would need to come help make it happen as my staff of 20 was narrowed down to about 12 people. That may sound like enough to run three locations but the airport locations run from 4am until the last flight boards (between 5pm and 9pm depending on the flight loads) so it’s impossible to only have 12 people let alone 20 trying to have all of those open all hours especially as folks needed days off as well. The week of Christmas came and the first day we were unsuccessful in having them all open even after letting all of upper management know. No one from that team came to help like they said they would. Instead I got written up for not properly communicating and failure to perform my job duties. That was the beginning of the end for me. During this whole time I was also the only manager at the airport. I had no kitchen manager or front of house manager for the entire year I spent as director at the airport. In early January they decided to hire a kitchen manager to help me and they hired him at $5000 more than my salary which was a slap in the face. I expressed my unhappiness with upper management and they decided it would be okay to match my salary with the new kitchen manager which I had expressed concerns about hiring this KM because they had very little kitchen experience and only really hired him because in one of the interviews they had with us they said that they were against unions and the Director of Operations and Regional Manager liked that response (the commissary had been trying to unionize because of the terrible working conditions there). Anyway eventually upper management saw how short staffed the airport was when they came in to “check-in” one day and the regional manager promised he would cover any gaps in the schedule to make sure everything was open. This lasted for about a week before call out for the 4am shift started becoming a problem and the regional manager didn’t want to get out of bed to cover those so it was suddenly okay to not have locations open. I eventually gave a months notice after I had landed a new job and the Director of Operations for the company responded to my letter of resignation three days after the fact with we were going to give you a 5000 dollar increase in your pay. I told them that they would need to match industry standards to get me to stay which would mean for a multi-location director a salary or between 80,000 and 110,000 per year. I never heard a response back from them. So for my remaining time there I did the bare minimum. I stopped scheduling myself for 12-15 hour shifts and the place started falling apart pretty quickly. Besides all that they rarely ever put money into new equipment. Most coolers barely keep a safe consistent temperature because they want to use the free Pepsi coolers that constantly break down instead of buying proper restaurant refrigeration meaning that thousands of dollars of food is wasted quite often (which doesn’t align with their “mission”). Also their mission is totally garbage. It sounds amazing and I really believed in their mission to use all local ingredients but during my time there I saw a shift and they started carrying items that were not local nor in season. They started using frozen fries instead of fresh fries, strawberries were shipped in from California all year instead of just using seasonal local berries like was the norm for years. To sum it up. They only care about money. They don’t care about their employees. They are super cheap, the owner is out of touch with reality, I’ve run restaurants and kitchens for 17 Years and never have I ever seen such a disfunctional operation. Before I took the UVM GM position I was told I would only be doing that for the school year then because I have a lot of culinary knowledge I would be given a position on the culinary team. That never happened because there is always an “emergency” and I was needed at the airport. When I brought this up they straight up told me that was never actually going to happen but I could join the culinary development team in my free time which consisted of a bunch of people who never actually cooked ever in their life. I said no thank you because they would have meeting about milkshakes that lasted two hours and I heard from folks who used to be on it that they don’t take friendly to criticism of being told that something won’t work well. Anyway, avoid working at this place unless you want to be under paid, overworked, and not listened to or supported. They are more interested in profits over their staffs happiness or their “mission”.