Management degrades employees - Vertist Noon Mediterranean Employee Review

I could never recommend that anyone work here. I was hired on as a minimum wage, line employee. During the interview I was informed by one of the co-owners that Verts is a growing company, hoping to open several new restaurants in Austin and greater Texas, and there would be plenty of opportunity to move in to management position and even potentially a job within the corporate office. This was untrue. A couple of weeks into my employment, uppermanagement hired on a host of new managers for their stores. None of these new hires came from within the company (and this includes a number of hard-working, qualified employees who had been with Verts for nearly two years in some instances). The management style of this place is "chew out your subordinates." On several occasions I heard middle-management claim they were sick of being hassled and "chewed out" by those in the corporate office, who were concerned about lackluster sales at the particular Verts location I worked at. These chew-outs make their way down the line. The manager I was originally hired under is one of the most insufferable, ego-tripping bastards I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. Problems with sales at the store were then blamed on the minimum wage line-service staff by middle-management. We were incompetent and therefore customers were failing to return to our location to eat (this is contradicted by Yelp reviews for the store location I worked at, which ubiquitously praise the line staff). Management would change basic restaurant procedures absurdly often, with no coherent explanation of new procedures and then hourly employees were taken to task for failing to follow the update procedures. Nextly, if you are looking for a place to work that maintains the vibe of Austin this is the opposite of the sort of place you are looking for. The upper-management at Verts are obsessed with becoming millionaires and starting up the Subway or Chipoltle of kebap sandwiches, they are not interested in creating a cool Austin spot. They want uniformity. They want you to wipe your personality and just be salesman for their crappy side-options as you interact with customers. They do not source things locally the way they claim to (for example, our tortillas DO NOT come from El Milagro, despite the fact that El Milagro tortillas are advertised and the schematics for customer interaction pasted behind the line instruct employees to say that the tortillas come from Milagro). Also, if you take a job here your schedule will consist of split-double shifts 3-4 times a week. For example, you may be scheduled to work from 10-2 and then 5:30-11. If you have to take the bus home you will have no time to do so during this break. So what happens, in practise, is that you sit around Verts for 13 hours on this day, despite the fact that you are going to be paid for 9. Also, if you forget to clock out after you get off your shift, Vert's official policy is that you forfeit your payment for that shift. Bottom line: the owners of this place have business degrees and no sense of how to interact with or treat employees underneath them, no management experience, no restaurant experience, and they seem to believe that demeaning their middle-management and hourly staff is the best way to operate their restaurant. Hourly staff was mocked and insulted in emails amongst corporate management, and this in turn makes it very difficult to prove your efficacy as an employee or even hope to make more than 8$ an hour there. Last comment: After two weeks of work my paycheck was routinely less than 400$. Only take this job if you have no dignity, are a college student who doesn't actually need to make money, or if you are 14-16 years old and this is your first job. Awful, awful place to work. I would not even spend my money on a sandwich from this place after my experience working there.