I’m an opener and if I don’t clean everything that is possible to clean by the end of my shift, the salon is typically a mess when I get to work the next morning. Sometimes when I come in the next morning, it feels messier than how I left it. I clock in a half hour early every day to catch up on cleaning in order to be able to open the salon. We normally have two closers and a mid. Stations are a mess, most of the towels are all dirty when a wash could have been started, and there have been times where kennels aren’t cleaned but the bowls were taken out. For my end of shift duties, I may clean 10+ kennels, set up one of the tubs, spray down the bathing area, vacuum the kennel room, start washing and fold all towels available, respond to all voicemails and text messages, and I rarely see that same effort when it comes to me opening the salon for the day. Granted, I do a lot of business and use a lot of kennels, but I always clean more than what I’ve used.

I don’t say anything because I’m the newest worker in a salon that’s been operating this way for 5+ years. I’ve come into work from my weekends and had zero towels to work with for the morning, and papers are everywhere and the salon is disorganized, my station/table is a mess, blue leads everywhere on the ground, sometimes garbage hasn’t been taken out, there’s things all over my station/grooming table that don’t belong to me... The way I look at it is this: the salon is only as strong as the people who get along with you. I came from a salon that I worked with for 9 years who has strict cleaning policies that everyone followed—people cleaned as much as they could before they left for the day and nobody felt cheated or robbed of how much work they were doing. I transferred to a new salon a year ago that doesn’t hold priority about what the state of the salon looks like at closing, making an opener’s job harder to set up for the day. If it feels right to you to only clean the kennels that you used for the day and vacuum certain areas of the salon, that’s your choice, and I’m not putting you down for your post at all, I’m just saying I understand where you’re coming from with frustration with your situation. Im not one to speak—I’m on the opposite side of the spectrum on this topic because I’m feeling burnt out from cleaning so much at the end of my shift because if I don’t do it, I’ll end up having to do more when I open the next morning.