Morale around the locations has started to trend downward over the past couple of years. This is due to several things, but mainly staffing, promotions, and unlimited customers.
Crew locations are notoriously short staffed. I see emails multiple times a week of locations reaching out to get shift coverage. The problem is that all locations experience short staffing (some more than others) which means no one has extra help to lend out. This leads to the over working and burning out of managers. We as managers are expected to pick up the slack when a high schooler calls off because they have a headache. 45 hours a week minimum is plenty. There have been a number of times when I have worked 50-55 hours just to help the store make ends meet. But the second you cannot pick up another shift, your WIT's attitude "Whatever it Takes) is called into question. Stores are also encouraged to run with the least amount of people necessary to complete a job. We must follow strict staffing guidelines and if we don't there are repercussions. There is no work-life balance. Forget about having weekends off or a regular schedule.
The next downfall is the constant promotions we are forced to bombard on our customers. In the past there were just a couple of shorter promotions throughout the year to show off the books and maybe the unlimited once or twice. Now, we are constantly promoting pretty much year round. The 2018 Father's Day book sale kicked off several weeks earlier than normal this year. When that ended in the middle of June, we immediately (the day after) transitioned into an Unlimited Introductory Pricing sale. Initially we were told this promotion would run based on how successful it was. Shockingly, the promotion was successful and it has been extended not once but twice until November 11. To make things better, we started our 8 week book promotion for Christmas on November 12. I wish the organization would have been more upfront with how long they intended this sale to last. Those of us who work at the location level are exhausted with these promotions. Sure, your revenue has probably increased. But your teams are worn out. It is incredibly frustrating to have every customer cut you off mid sentence in your "recommendation" and throw the handout back at your face because they have heard some variation of this speech for the past 5 months.
This leads me to my third grievance: The Unlimited Club. The Unlimited Club has destroyed Crew Carwash and what made it a nice place to work. Location volumes have doubled and even tripled in some cases over the course of the last couple years. Yet we still have the same expectations to complete weekly and period tasks around the store and are expected to do more with hardly any staffing. We also still must complete grueling tasks such as nightly clean up if a location does not have cleanup team members. All of this is in addition to the frustration of washing the same clean cars everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. I can tell you what time a day a certain customer (who I know by name) will show up to have their car washed for the 12th time this week. This is just grueling and employees at the location level are exhausted.
