Why I Quit the "Coop"

After working at Honest Weight for five years, five years that sometimes felt like ten, I decided to resign from the "Coop". The primary but not only reason I resigned was the fact that I was bullied, harassed, and embarrassed by a staff member at the “Coop” one not so wonderful Thursday evening.

The harassment happened during my shift on 16 August 2018. One of the new front end supervisors, let’s call him N after that Russian tradition where the guilty are made anonymous thanks to the letter N, asked me, in front of a customer, why I did not come and get him to deal with an expired coupon. I didn’t because I have never been asked to do this by management and had never done this during my years at Honest Weight. My understanding was that once a coupon had expired it had expired. Later during the same shift, N, as I was bagging at another register being run by NN, walked up to me and muttered  "you decided to actually work tonight". First of all, joking or not joking aside, doing this in front of a customer and in public is very unprofessional and unacceptable, at least in my book. Then, a minute or so later, I asked the same customer I was bagging for, if she wanted another shopping cart since her cart was full and I had to put a bag on top of other bags that contained soft items like bananas. N made fun of me for asking this question of the customer.

Management, of course, did its due diligence. It investigated the report I submitted on this incident. N apparently denied remembering anything. NN, apparently did a Sgt. Schultz saying she knew nothing, heard nothing, and saw nothing. I know, by the way, that NN heard the third of N's school yard performances because she looked right at me and gave me one of those WTF quizzical looks.

Here was the rub. For the first time in my volunteer and staff work life at Honest Weight I didn’t feel comfortable working or even coming into the store. After all while one bullying time may be an accident, two bullying times is not a charm, and three bullying times is a pattern of behaviour.
I would, by the way, have stayed at HW for a few more years if management had changed my schedule so I didn't have to work with the bully, but they refused, so I quit.

After all that happened way too much proverbial water had passed under that proverbial bridge. Additionally, I really don't need to work at Honest Weight to make it economically. Add to this my health problems--asthma, sinusitis, osteoporosis, and degenerative musculoskeletal arthritis, all of which were affecting me more and more at work--and it was was perhaps the right time to go.

For the most part, I enjoyed working at Honest Weight over the years. It has, of course, always been a crazy place to work with its petty and silly political cold and hot wars and its quite evident inconsistencies and contradictions. Still I will probably miss it once in a while.