Paycheck Hell with a Dumbass Store Manager

Arcade Anarchist recounts a horror story about his paycheck:

This story comes from deep within my retail history.

About 4 or 5 jobs back I was working at a grocery store deli. Cutting cheese and the like. I was supposed to be paid biweekly, and was working 25ish hour weeks. The store was going threw lots of remodeling and was getting ready for a "grand reopening" kinda thing. How you can have a grand reopening without actually closing I'm not sure.

Now I know that some jobs hold first paychecks for whatever bullshit reasonings (luckily enough I have yet to have a job do this), so I wasn't too surprised when I didn't receive one the first payday. So I went about my work as per usual.

Two weeks later during my lunch break I decided to grab my paycheck and have the customer service cash it out for me. Once again they didn't have it. This was kind of ridiculous, it has now been a month. So I ask them for an advance much lower than I should have gotten but enough to pay for the stuff I needed like LUNCH.

Two weeks later, no check!

I'm off duty at this point and there was no one else around. So I ask if they can look threw the entire pile of checks, unlike the first two times where they only looked threw the deli-worker section.

I was very surprised to discover the store had another employee who shared my last name. This is because it's a very uncommon one. I have never met anyone with the same last name as me that I didn't know to be family.

But that was beside the point, still no paycheck so I had to get a small cash paid out.

I was at this job for about 3 months, 1 month after the grand reclamation of souls.

The last day I was on the job also happened to be a payday, and as before no paycheck. I was just furious, and ended up having a long conversation with the store manager. He gave me a cashout and was going to try and figure out what happened.

Before when I complained it ended up forever on the bottom of his to-do list. So he told me to come back when my last payday should be and hopefully we would settle it by then.

When I came in those two weeks later there was a paycheck there with my name on it, for not very much at all.

BUT, they refused to give it to me because I had taken so many cash pay outs.

Once again I had to talk with the manager who laid me off, about the money they weren't giving me, for the work I did on the time I coulda been doing something more productive and less stressful... like take up shark wrestling.

He explained to me what the problem was. When I was being put into the system by him he had gotten my name, gender, and department wrong.

Okay so I am a 6'5" male, my first and last name together are only 8 letters long. This manager d-bag ass-hole placed me in the computer as a 5' female named Rachael working in a department the store didn't even have. I don't know why the computers even needed my height, but it was wrong. Too many things wrong with this situation.

It took me months after that to get it all cleared up and get what they owed me. Then about another 2 months later, I received a letter in the mail from them.

On the front it had something explaining that it was a check for what they had still owed me. I was still unemployed and looking for work at the time, so I thought it was great to be getting a little more money.

A whole 37 cents worth on the check.

Arcade Anarchist

p.s.

Oh, and to anyone who remembers my last post about my current boss, he went to the hearing at the licensing board, and the arcade gets to remain in business, so I get to keep my current employment.

Comments

[Kympro]

Sounds like what my sister's restaurant did to her. They kept misspelling her name, address, and social security number. They had her living in a completely different city! When she received her first check, she told her manager, who said he would fix it immediately (yeah right). Her next few checks were the same, and after few months of back and forth from the manager, he finally told her accounting messed up. Of course the accounting office was outside of town and he told her this on a weekend, so the office was closed and we couldn't get it fixed. We finally fixed it, and thank goodness she didn't have problems filing her taxes that year.

[Blockbitcher]

Damn! >:$ I would have called the Better Business Bureau on those skank-ass bitches!

[rae]

Ugh! My sympathies!

My father had a problem with a business shorting his checks, or the checks bouncing. He ended up working three months without a paycheck... and then the business declared bankruptcy.

The worst I've had is working at a place that was always two weeks behind with the paycheck, so I worked a month and a half before I got my first, but at least I got it!

[Amy]

Oh my god, 37 cents? What a jerk move. Sorry, dude. =(

(You were getting paid bi-monthly, that is, twice per month. Bi-weekly is twice per week.)

[Spritzy]

My husband got a check for 4 cents a few weeks after he left his old job. He wanted to frame it for the sanke of the pure idiocy of it all. It cost them more to mail the check than it was even worth...heck the paper it was printed on probably cost more.

[Jit]

*Is in agreeance with Blockbitcher*

[Rhu.....JASON]

Sorry this happened to you, Arcade Anarchist.

This makes me angry.

My question to you is:

When the company...(your boss) was doing this to you, why did you not contact a lawyer for advice. This could of turned out to be a BIG LAWSUIT.

You lost in the end. You let the company take advantage of you and I hope you were able to pay your bills on time!

[Arcade anarchist]

I did end up contacting better business which was most of what I had to do to get what I was supposed to be getting. If I hadn't I would have been stuck with the lack of pay they gave me. Cool thing was they forced the store to round up my dollars per hour which was kind of nice.

and to Jason, there was no lawsuit involved for two reasons.
1: I was freshly out of high school like I had started there the summer after I had gotten out.
2: Still living with parents so I barely cared at all.

[Lou]

Actually, bi-weekly is the correct term. Bi-weekly means occurring every two weeks.

I cannot believe they did that to you... how ridiculous.

[bi-something]

Yeah, Amy you have that whole concept backwards. Bi-monthly means once every two months. Some magazine subscriptions are that way. I just did a check via the Merriam-Webster dictionary before offering further correction, and "bi-" does actually have "twice" listed as a secondary definition to the primary one, which is "two".

[Emancipated, for now]

At a job my husband once had, if he didn't take his paycheck on Friday and drive IMMEDIATELY to the company's bank (not ours) and CASH IT, it was likely to bounce...