People Spill The Deets About Their Eccentric Revenge

“This is six years’ worth of illegal practices and abuse. It’s super cathartic for me to write this. And I’m going to spare no expense on the dirt.

I’ve now been out of the company long enough that I feel safe and secure enough to post about how I left my six-year-long career at a famous chain sub shop.

I’ve always posted stories about entitled customers/parents from there. But this one will be about my super entitled, jerk of a boss, and how I got my sweet revenge when I finally left the company.

How it started: When I was 25, I was in a pretty weird situation where I needed a job, and I could not afford to be picky about which one I got.

I just happened to be in a local sub shop asking the manager if they were hiring, and the owner was there that day. He hired me on the spot, and I started working the next day. Training went quickly, and I was working 40 hours a week and finally earning some coin.

My first red flag that something here was not exactly normal was the fact that the manager quit less than a month after I had been hired. She had asked for weekends off to be with her children, and the owner told her no. She actually made a fully functional schedule that worked for everyone that gave her Saturdays off.

He put her back to Wednesdays off, so she just walked out. I was promoted to manager with less than a month of training under me. But I was determined to stay with the job, and I was going to enjoy the dollar raise that came with it.

So I taught myself how to do inventory and food orders. I taught myself how to make schedules and do all the other things that a sub shop manager does.

I actually got pretty good at it. After a year of doing it, I had expedited the inventory process and made it so functional, the owner had me teach other managers that he hired at his other franchise locations. He owned six shops total. They were scattered all over the place, and two of them (one I worked at) were less than a mile from each other.

He decided he wanted to have a monopoly in the city and bought the last sub shop in the area. He made me area manager and put me at the new location.

Basically, my daily job was this: show up at 11 AM to relieve the store opener. Make sure that everything was functioning. Work until 7 PM when I would be relieved by the closer. Then I would drive to the other two locations to check and make sure everything was OK.

Some days I will drive to location a in the morning before my shift started, and I would drive to location b after my shift started. On Tuesdays, I did inventories. And on Wednesdays, I did three stores worth of delivery orders.

The store I was working at was slow enough that it technically only needed one person working at a time with a little overlap during the lunch and dinner ‘rush’.

It kind of sucked sometimes. If it got busy, you were doing it all on your own. You had to help customers during your lunch break. And you didn’t technically get breaks. Going to the bathroom was a gamble. I still dread hearing that doorbell go off when I was mid-stream.

At first, it was a perfectly reasonable job. I had the stores operating effectively.

Everything was organized, inventory counts were very accurate and there was very little shrink. Customers were happy. That lasted about six months before things started getting… Illegal.

I think my boss was having some kind of personal/marriage problems and was taking it out on his staff. Both he and his woman came from super-rich families. (Millionaires. I have been to their mansion one time for a birthday party.

Indoor and outdoor pool, private movie theater complete with bar and popcorn maker… They had cash to burn.) The first illegal thing happened when our store got broken into. A thief broke the window with a rock and tried to find the cash box. As it was locked in the safe, he didn’t get anything. But he did pry open the till drawer to find it empty.

The police called me since my number was on the whiteboard marked as “emergency contact.” I showed up and took inventory and told the police the thief had stolen nothing. I even gave them video footage of the thief. A few days later, a cop came back and asked me to confirm how much had been stolen from the store. I told him $0. It turns out… My boss had reported a loss of $500 from the cash box.

I’m not sure if he got fined for filing a false police report. But he showed up at work the next day and yelled at me. He told me, “You don’t tell the cops anything unless I give you permission next time.”

Over the next couple of months, he also started becoming a penny pincher at all of his locations. He would jack up the price of the subs to the maximum amount he was allowed to by the franchise.

He would skimp on the veggies and would yell at us if we put on the recommended amount. (if the recipe called for eight slices of turkey he told us to put on 6). Basically angering all my regulars. it killed our business. Which meant we were earning less, which made him more of a penny pincher.

Things started breaking in the store and he wouldn’t hire professionals to fix it.

He would bring in “friends” and pay them in beer. I remember his mechanic friend coming in to ‘fix’ our freezer over 10 times in a year. It never properly kept the food at freezing temperatures and leaked water into the freezer. When health inspectors would come in, they would point it out and my boss would say, “Yeah, I’m getting it fixed next week” I was so nervous getting frozen food out of the freezer that was basically 33° all the time.

Our frozen bread was floppy half the time.

I dealt with this for multiple years. I know I’m an idiot. I should’ve run away long ago. But I was literally living hand to mouth, and me and my partner were trying to keep a roof over our head. We were both working 60+ hours a week. We just didn’t have our lives together enough to be picky.

If I was going to leave that store, I would need to find a job that paid 1.5 times the minimum wage as a starter pay to make the same amount I was doing 60 hours a week as the area manager.

It was when my boss started doing illegal labor law practices that I begin seriously looking to leave. I handled faxing in the payroll at the end of every week.

There’s always a little star next to your clock in/out when the time has been altered. (I’ll fix it if somebody forgets to clock in, forgets to clock out, etc.) I started noticing that everybody’s hours have been adjusted multiple times on multiple days. The boss was cutting people’s hours back by half an hour+. If they clocked in at six, he would change it to 6:30.

I pointed this out to him. He usef the excuse that “they just stand around and waste time every shift. So I take that time away.” He installed video cameras. He would literally watch them from home with a stopwatch and send me a text at the end of the day telling me to retract certain amounts of time off of everybody’s shift. I told him no. If he wanted this done, he could do it himself.

It was crazy illegal, and I wanted no part of it.

I also discovered something one year when he was showing me how to do the year end reports for tax filing. Even though the stores were a franchise, and were all owned and operated by him and his woman. Each individual store he had registered under a different business name and a different bank.

I.e. you worked at store A, you got a paycheck from “Waldo and sons LLC” and if you covered somebody shift at store B the same week, you got a second paycheck from “Waldo inc” ect. I asked him why he did this; as it seemed incredibly unnecessary and complicated. He told me it was for tax purposes. He paid less taxes if he registered each store as its own individual franchise.

(Edit: he also had them registered under different peoples names) I pointed out that this was illegal. He said he could get away with it by claiming that each store was owned by somebody else in his family. I.e. the store was owned by his woman, the store was in his name, this store was in his brothers name etc…. It was super shady.

I had already been here six years dealing with this crap. I was fixing to leave very soon. I had enough saved up to cover bills for at least three months to give me time to find a new job. I kept telling him that if he pushed me too far I would leave him high and dry with no area manager and he would have to come all the way out to man the stores himself.

(he showed up to the stores maybe once a week. He mostly went to the stores closest to his house. he hated having to drive the hour long drive from where he lived to my 3 Stores Way out in the boondocks) The day finally came where he pushed me to my breaking point.

Inspectors of the franchise came monthly. They were technically required to find three things wrong at every location, because nobody could be perfect.

There was minor moderate and major errors that they could find. Major errors got the owner fined. I had only had one major error found between my three stores in the six years there. But one day the boss called yelling at me because of a burnt out lightbulb in the oven. It was a minor error; but he laid into me like I had just gotten the store shut down.

It was so bad, my mother and father heard him yelling at me the phone speaker. My dad promised to cover my rent until I can get a new job. I just sat silently and let him yell. When it was over I said “ok. I’ll do better tomorrow” then hung up.

That night, I stayed up super late finding all the phone numbers for L&I, OSHA and all the legal resources I could.

The next day I didn’t go into work. I stayed home making phone calls. I still had texts from the boss telling me to adjust peoples hours. I had recordings from our security cameras of him changing the dates on the prepped food so we didn’t throw it away as soon. I even had five years plus worth of pay stubs from Three different business names, owned by three different people, but all signed by him.

L&I was incredibly interested to hear about the time clock adjustments. They happily excepted emailed copies of all my text logs. And several dozen pages of faxed paystubs. I also learned that he should have been paying me overtime for working 20 hours extra each week. He told me I was salary. Yet he classified my pay as hourly…

I ended up speaking to a couple of different people about his fraudulent tax practices.

Every single one of them wanted copies of my paystubs and proof that they were owned by the same person.

The best call I saved for last: A call to the local health inspector. I informed them about the leaky freezer. The changing of dates on prepped food. The disgusting practice of keeping food far past its expiration date. The temp log book that we literally just wrote down random numbers instead of actually taking the temps because “it takes too long to do that every two hours” Or my personal favorite… The time a plumber was fixing the toilet and it literally exploded poopy water out into our lobby.

The boss made us keep the store open and mop it up quickly… Right in front of customers…The health inspector was VERY interested.

All of these calls I did while getting dozens of angry voicemails/texts from my boss asking me where the heck I was. Since I was literally supposed to be working a shift and didn’t show up, the poor opener had to stay late and the closer had to come in early.

I felt a little bad about that. But I knew the next day the boss himself would have to come in to cover the shift unless he hired somebody and trained them overnight. I ignored every single one of his phone calls.

I just never went back. Not even for my last paycheck. I never heard back about getting all that unpaid overtime. But I did hear through the g*******e about the fallout of what happened the next few months.

Two of my bosses stores were completely shut down. As in health inspectors put a red warning label on the doors and gave him one month to fix all of the problems before they would let him open again. He lost his franchise rights with the company. He had to sell all of his stores to other franchisees. Since he was still paying back loans on a couple of them he had to sell them at a loss.

Almost every single one of his employees working for him at the time got huge payouts for the missing time that he had removed from their time clock. One former employee I met up almost a year later told me that he got a $5000 check. He had only been there a year… I also learned that my boss got put on two years probation in Lou of prison time.

And apparently, he failed his first surprise substance test….. so he ended up spending a couple of weeks behind bars anyway.

I found out through social media that my boss’s woman left him for a year to “let him get his head screwed on right,” and when they got back together, she made him be a stay at home dad while she went out and ran the stores that were still in her name.

I know it’s not as climatic as some pro revenge stories on this site. But it felt SO GOOD to basically flipped him the bird and let him sleep in the bed that he had made. I’ve got another job now; and I get paid the same amount that I was earning from him but I only work 40 hours a week. I get actual lunch breaks now.

I get overtime now. I actually didn’t realize how illegal his practices had been until I started working a normal 9-to-5 job. To this day the idea of taking a lunch break without having to help customers in the middle of it is just… Wonderful!

Sorry for how long the story was. But I hope some people enjoy the absolute craziness that was my jerk boss.

And now you all know why I will probably never eat at another chain/franchise sub shop again LOL.”