Worker Closes Up Early & Tells Customers To Go Tell Management To Hire More Staff

The workers let customers know where to leave their complaints.

By Alexandra Blogier — Written on Jun 03, 2023

Photo: Reddit, Ron Lach / Pexels

Worker's note for customers, overworked employee

An employee at a deli took a stand against unfair working conditions, posting his small act of protest on the subreddit r/antiwork, a Reddit thread where employees air their work-related grievances.

“We closed at 5 when we close at 8 normally,” the worker explained, then posted an image of the letter his coworker wrote to alert customers that they were closing early.

The deli workers closed early and told disgruntled customers to tell management to hire more staff.

Photo: Reddit

“Sorry for the inconvenience, but we have closed early due to staffing,” the letter read. “If you have any problems, talk to management whom [sic] refuses to hire appropriate staff for the area.”

While the majority of the comments on the thread were commenting on the letter’s grammatical mistakes, even the people who focused more on the proper use of “whom” seemed to understand the point that the letter was getting across– there weren’t enough people hired to create a healthy working environment.

When he was called out for incorrectly using the word “whom,” the worker who made the post came to the comments to let other Redditors know that “we honestly couldn’t care about grammar and the like. We’re deli clerks, not office workers.”

The workers’ letter let customers know where the glitches of the job were— not with them, but with management.

An article published by Business Insider took on the topic of the apparent labor shortage the United States is experiencing, explaining that “the Congressional Budget Office projects the potential labor force to expand by a mere 3.6% between 2022 and 2031… Over the following decade, that growth is projected to slow even more, to 2.9%. That means employers face decades of an essentially stagnant labor pool.”

The remote work capabilities that arrived with the economic sea-change of the pandemic certainly changed the labor landscape. Workers’ expectations of being treated fairly and being allowed a better work-life balance have also shifted. Yet there are numerous people job-hunting who can’t find a position, leading them to ask about the validity of the claim that there’s a labor shortage in the US.

Business Insider maintained that "it remains incredibly hard to find and hire enough qualified people for the roles they're desperately trying to fill. Somehow, workers still hold the power— and a massive shift that's underway in the labor market could keep it that way forever."

Service work, especially, is an industry that’s incredibly challenging to work in. Maybe those deli workers did the right thing in taking off a little early— after all, peace of mind could be worth the cost.