I feel like some strange combination of those street corner preachers screaming, “THE END IS NIGH, REPENT YOUR SINS” and the grizzled war vet heading for their third tour of duty, but I have literally spent the past three days at Target trying to convince our Team Leads that we are not ready for Black Friday.

We literally have ONE PERSON scheduled from 12:15 to 3:30pm on Friday.  She’s ALONE at Starbucks for over three hours.  We have another girl alone from 12:30 to 2am during the BOGO free holiday drink special.  Half of our trained staff isn’t even working in Starbucks, they’re cashiering.  For the entirety of Friday we’ll never have more than two people in Starbucks when in past years we’ve had at least three people.

I went to HR and asked about that because it just didn’t seem right and she just coolly told me that this has been approved by our LOD and DM so there’s nothing we can do about it.  Okay, so do they WANT the highest selling location to be run by one person for over three hours on Black Friday?  We literally had more coverage yesterday, a normal Friday, than we will on Black Friday.  Something is messed up there and I don’t feel as if I can trust our Team Lead to make it right.  We’ve had this schedule for a week now and she didn’t notice these huge problems that I found after ONE CHECK of the schedule.  It honestly feels like sabotage at this point.

Today I had a guest ask if we had anymore vanilla sweetened milk boxes for his baby and I honest to God lied and said no, because it was because I didn’t want that much sugar in that baby.

So instead I just filled up the baby’s bottle with regular milk for free.

I can’t bring myself to be a part of the diabetes epidemic in children lately, it’s so heartbreaking. I will honestly be fired before I let one more parent put a grande caramel frappuccino–extra caramel!– in their 16 month old. Not from my hands, no sir.

I had a guest try to give me a $10 tip tonight because I saved him a slice of pumpkin bread. But I couldn’t take it because of Target’s no tips rule. ;-;

I handed out free sample of pumpkin spice latte today at work because it was slow, and this jolly group of marines fresh out of the barracks for the weekend sauntered over excitedly. They asked what it was before taking a sample and when I said, “Pumpkin Spice Latte,” their hands flew back so quickly you’d think terrorists had made bombs out of them at some time. The look of terror was hilarious, and they proceeded to mumble about cults and Kool-Aid.

So I asked them what their favorite drinks were and they all left with free tall drinks.