A Burger King location in Lincoln, Nebraska has gone viral for all the wrong reasons after all the employees at the fast food restaurant quit on the same day—and said so on the roadside sign out front.
According to the location's former general manager Rachel Flores, who spoke with TODAY, the employees chose to quit when they grew fed up with prolonged shortstaffing issues, frequent managerial turnover, and "hectic" working conditions.
Flores began her tenure at the BK location in August 2020. Like so many others, she was forced to find new work after losing her job at the beginning of the pandemic.
But as Flores described to TODAY, the change was even more difficult than she expected.
"We had just got really tired of upper management and them not coming to help and not caring about the employees."
"It was pretty hectic. They were already short-staffed (in August) and the general manager was pretty loud and crazy, very argumentative."
"As I became general manager, it got more crazy. I had multiple different bosses."
Flores gave a detailed description of the poor working conditions that came after she became GM.
"In the beginning of the summer when it was extremely hot, it would be extremely hot in the kitchen because the AC wasn't working and temperatures were reaching the mid-90s most days."
"It was causing a lot of issues with employees, they were getting dehydrated. … That took three or four weeks to get fixed."
"One of the days I was extremely delirious, I was very dehydrated."
Eventually, Flores encountered a personal struggle with those issues.
"When I was two minutes late, my boss called me and when I told him what was going on, he told me I was being a baby and I was making excuses and that I needed to do my job."
"I ended up going to the hospital that night for dehydration. I had to get IV fluids and everything."
"I had called my boss' boss and I told him how I was treated, how my boss hung up on me and everything he said to me, and he said I was lying, that he never said that."
Apparently, those difficulties ultimately became too much for anyone to bear. Several people put in their two weeks' notice.
But a few days before the two weeks were up, they all stormed out. So possible customers would know what the heck was going on, they updated the sign.
When someone took a photo of the sign and posted it to Facebook, the image quickly went viral.
As the general manager at the time the sign went up, Flores was fired for her role in the sudden exit.
Her ouster came, however, just a couple days before she planned to leave.
But if it was any conciliation, plenty of people online were complete supporters of the employees' decision to stand up for themselves.
When the story was picked up by several news outlets, the well-wishes were flying.
Upper management is learning without your people there is no business. Glad workers are also waking up to that power.— \u2c6e (@\u2c6e) 1626103788
Will never eat at a burger king until they're paid fairly we need support our American workers.— Al Duque (@Al Duque) 1626115333
The days of management treating employees like they are the same sh$t their food is made from are over.— Laurie (@Laurie) 1626104440
pic.twitter.com/ajtpdQEDcy— j.m. (@j.m.) 1626226013
For Flores, all those supportive responses meant a lot.
"It was a lot more positive than I expected, because there are a lot more people that think that we quit because we weren't making enough money or because flipping a burger was a little bit too hard."
"It was nothing like that. It was upper management being crappy."
"To see the amount of support that we employees actually got was actually really nice, to know that we are inspiring people to reevaluate their self-worth when it comes to a job actually feels pretty great."
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