Yup. I also live in a nice area.

I worked at a small business for 6 years. We shipped alcohol across the entire country, had major holiday orders even for things like NBC, the today show, and lion's gate did their holiday gifts through us.

Suffice to we made fuckin bank, and were comprised of 12 employees when I started. 4 cashiers, 4 management who were also capable and willing to fill in and help lower level laborers, and we had of course, the 4 lower level laborers, myself included initially.

In 2023 I was promoted to shipping manager and salaried, pay was good and and the year end bonus from the owner was decent.

In 2023 we were already down to 8 employees. Order volume was up over 3 years, so less people were fulfilling more work. I was fresh off my promotion so I was pretty blind for a bit.

Cut to this year and we had 5 employees. Order volume was slightly higher than it was in 2023. 5 people were now doing more work than 12 were just 6 years prior.

To give some perspective: As shipping manager, one holiday order from a local customer, would be for 100 individual bottles of wine shipped with gift notes inside each once and each bottle gift wrapped.

We had around 15 of these holiday orders and 13 of them came in after December 5. We brought in 1 person for seasonal help.

So just counting the holiday orders, excluding our in store and base online orders that include an email mailing list of 12,000 customers , put us even with conservative estimates at 1,500 individual bottles of alcohol that needed to be brought into the store, gift wrapped, individual cards made, and shipped in time for Christmas.

6 people was not enough. My mental health was destroyed and I had major depressive disorder until I finally quit this year.

My boss would keep cutting people, bitching about money, pushing ridiculous sales when we had no staffing, and all the while he travels to Europe with his family multiple times a year, has a 7 bedroom home, drives a Mercedes, and not one mother fucking time gave up any of it.