Pros
flexible hours, nice customers, boss sometimes gives food to workers
Cons
Here is everything wrong with Cafe Tapioca:
My boss there had favorites. There were no other manager type figures - just the boss and workers. Yet, the pay difference was like worker vs. manager pay. I, along with several other workers, got minimum wage, while there was one worker I know in particular who was friends with the boss outside of the workplace, who was paid 1.5x more per hour than I was paid for the exact same work. As a minor, I wasn’t supposed to be working more than 4 hours in a school day when there was also school the next day, yet I was almost always scheduled for 5 hour shifts on school days/nights which is illegal. There was no clock in/clock out system, so any work done to finish cleaning up past 10PM (closing) was unpaid. Going back to the fact that my boss had favorites, he often would ask me to do tasks while I was busy doing another task, and let the other worker(s) whom he was more friendly with, sit on their phone and do nothing else. For that reason, he was very micromanaging. He never held workers up to the same standards. For example, the employee discount of 20% off was to be used by employees and their immediate families. One of my coworkers would often buy 4-5 drinks for her entire family with it, and our boss didn’t care, but I ONCE bought 4 drinks for my family and then the next day, my boss was complaining that it had “been bothering him since yesterday.” The facility had such a low standard of cleanliness. We had soap to wash dishes in the kitchen, but not to wash the blenders in the front area, and we only ever wiped down tables and other surfaces using towels with water - no disinfectant of any sort. The environment was very cliquey overall - as the majority of Mandarin speaking workers would only talk to each other and not be very friendly to those of us who could only speak English. When some of these workers said they didn’t want to work with me simply because I wasn’t as close with them, the boss went with it and not once did he ask me who I would like to work with. One worker in particular wanted to work with a certain person, so to get out of working with me, they tried to get rid of me entirely by telling the boss that I stole ice cream multiple times and ate it during my shift - which is a ridiculous claim seeing as I’m lactose intolerant so I can’t even have it. I brought this up to the boss and all he said was, “Well I don’t have proof, but that is what they said.” And he never did anything about the way my coworkers there treated me. He also cut my hours in half without asking me if it was okay, just because a new worker we had wanted more hours. Overall, I believe that the boss saw that I was a hard worker and then took advantage of that, by paying me the bare minimum and often called me in to cover shifts last minute. There were no breaks, paid or unpaid, so the only time we’d ever get a bit of a “break” was when there were absolutely no customers and absolutely nothing to clean up. So, I once went through a busy eight-hour shift over the summer on a Friday afternoon/night without eating anything. The boss never did anything when some workers were very condescending to me. Another huge problem was that, unlike every other workplace I’ve applied to, there was no list of rules to abide by, so nobody was held up to the same standard. When I started working, I asked the boss if there was a list of rules to abide by, and he said no because “it’s common sense.” But I personally don’t believe in common sense, because people learn through experience, and no two people have the same experiences.