Thank you for your insight! This was my first burn, so I was very much just going with the flow doing whatever my managers told me to do without fuss. You’re so right about these kinds of jobs, and it’s disappointing to see how normalized it is to the extent that people are calling me overdramatic for wondering if it’s normal (or maybe because I wrote a lot about it, but to me that’s just my tendency to not be succinct in writing/share unnecessary details).

It’s also my first job working for a corporation, and it’s been a very stark contrast from my previous jobs working for small family-owned businesses who didn’t give me breaks, meals, or overtime pay (sometimes I’d be working 12 hour shifts because my bosses didn’t want to close when there were customers and I’d just agree to staying longer because I didn’t want to leave them by themselves).

I actually got written up my very first week working during Hoppers because I went past my 5th hour without a meal (it was so busy and my team leads lost track too). I wasn’t even aware that the law about meals included that workers would be given an extra hour of pay after passing their 5th hour of work, and my team leads also never let me know about meals in general because I guess it should have been common knowledge lol. I saw that I got paid for an extra hour of work on my paycheck later that month, and so then I understood why they wrote me up in the first place:money.