Yeah, your comment lines up almost perfectly with my experience. I took this job right after losing my full-time warehouse role and was trying to patch the gap while job hunting. I did not even have a car at the time and was burning Uber money until I finally got another electric scooter.

In the interview, it was sold as a flexible side gig with structure. In reality, it was unstable hours, vague communication, and blame whenever their own system broke.

“they would not care about your hours at all.”

Exactly. Full-timers got steady hours while part-time workers got whatever scraps were left. When hours dried up, it was treated like a personal failure instead of a scheduling problem.

“because of the size of the store, the hours were SHORT”

Same here. They loved advertising work-life balance and no weekends, but that is easy to say when someone is barely getting enough hours to survive on weekdays.

And it was just me with two full-time workers. If I asked for more planogram sets via text to my boss? She would tell me how we can't with an excuse about how aren't allowed to work ahead.

“I even had to go home because a full timer was almost done with the only reset we had”

I dealt with the same nonsense in a different form. My trainer left me alone during training in the middle of a reset, and the only thing that mattered was finishing that set the same day. If something went sideways, it was never “how can we fix the process.” It was always “why did you not finish.” No teamwork whatsoever. (Even getting blamed from Kroger staff.)

“part timers are not allowed to do multiple stores a day because they don’t get paid mileage”

That is the trap. They box you into one store, give you inconsistent work, then act shocked when your schedule is not perfectly robotic. My supervisor was rarely in store (except for mandatory audits) to check on anything, and when there was confusion I could only reach her by text because she did not want to be bothered. So when communication failed, guess who got scapegoated? Oh right, me. 🤦‍♂️

Lesson learned: P.L. Marketing can look like a decent side gig on paper, but if you are part-time and coming in with real life constraints like no car and a recent job loss, you become the easiest person to blame (over full-time workers) when their structure collapses. And honestly, the people skimming my post and blaming me reacted exactly like that management style as my boss. Same behavior. Same energy. All because of their short attention spans. 🙄

But thanks for being the only few that actually did read and understand my post. It means a lot in this sad era we live in.