What is driving staff complaints at coffee chain stores?

Employees at Luckin Coffee have taken to social media to describe store-closing routines that require photographing and filming shelf materials each morning and night. Workers say the process routinely pushes them past closing time without overtime pay, and that understaffing makes the checks harder to complete.

The chain operates more than 13,000 stores in China. Staff say the strict photo and video checks exist because expired goods were sold in the past, so shelf-life tracking became mandatory. Combined with timeliness-rate assessments, the workload has fueled resentment and rising turnover, which in turn leaves stores short-staffed and training stretched.

Recently, a Luckin employee posted on social media complaining that the company's store closing procedures are too cumbersome, requiring employees to take photos and videos to record materials, resulting in almost daily overtime without overtime pay. Multiple employees confirmed similar experiences in follow-up posts, pointing out that strict photo-taking is for food safety and shelf-life management, but the high frequency and insufficient staffing have exacerbated dissatisfaction. In addition, timeliness rate assessments also leave employees overwhelmed. These issues have long been ignored by the company, leading to soaring employee resentment, rising turnover rates, and increasingly serious chain problems such as store understaffing and inadequate training. Luckin now has over 13,000 stores, and employees are calling on the company to face up to its management loopholes.

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Recently, a Luckin employee posted on social media saying they wanted to complain about their own company, Luckin. From the post, it was learned that working at Luckin involves many troublesome rules, and quite a few rules and practices feel superfluous to employees, affecting work efficiency. But feedback to the company yielded no results, and they felt the company does not take the problems seriously.

According to this employee, their store needs to take out materials, arrange them, and photograph them every morning when opening and at closing, while light food requires video recording, and then everything must be put back after. In the morning, they even have to return to the store early to do this, and at night closing is even more troublesome—it takes at least half an hour or more to photograph the materials and put them back, and it cannot be done in advance; it must wait until after closing time, causing almost daily overtime, and this overtime is unpaid.

The post sparked considerable discussion, and many Luckin employees also said they had the same experience. According to these workers, the rule about taking photos and videos for opening and closing is mainly because employees had previously sold expired items, which led the company to be extremely strict about material shelf lives. Moreover, many stores only assign one person to night closing duty, which undoubtedly increases the workload for many night shifts, thus causing widespread dissatisfaction, with people saying "the new standard for closing duty is really disgusting" and "it's really ridiculous, so many procedures are just for show through photos."

The purpose of doing this is food safety and shelf-life supervision, which can prevent employees from keeping expired food, but many employees feel the frequency is too high, and understaffing has led to dissatisfaction.

Another issue is the timeliness rate, which refers to the time from when a customer places an order to when the drink is made and served not exceeding the prescribed time. Employees said that "during peak periods with a flood of orders, you still have to split your attention to mark orders as completed, and as soon as customers receive the notification they run over to ask, when in fact it hasn't been made at all."

Ultimately, these internal employee complaints are not something that has happened just once or twice. Many posts complaining about such things can be found on social media, but employees post them because they feel the company has not taken these issues seriously and that office leaders lack communication with employees. Many employees said the company only says it has received the feedback but never reports it to leadership, simply turning a deaf ear. Some employees also said, "No wonder there have been so many bad reviews about service attitude recently—employees are full of resentment. If the company doesn't treat employees like human beings, how can employees serve customers with care?"

So this also leads to a high turnover rate among Luckin employees, and with more people leaving, many stores face problems such as understaffing and inadequate training for new employees. If the problems are not properly solved, they roll up like a snowball. Luckin now has more than 13,000 stores, and many employees have already raised problems, so I hope Luckin will take these issues seriously.

Image source: Internet

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.