Posted on another thread, but not sure if it’s better suited here, as I’m spiralling out mentally because of this situation
Ok, so this may be a bit of a no brainer, but I have high functioning anxiety and I can’t actually tell whether I am the unreasonable one here. Basically, I work for a non essential business that runs both high street stores and concession stands in supermarkets. Since the latest lockdown measures came into place, all high street stores have since closed, but the supermarket locations have remained open. However, as we are non essential and have absolutely nothing to do with the supermarket, so we are required to run in a “click and collect” capacity. We were provided all necessary POS to elude to this, and we were issued guidelines for how we should operate. I wasn’t making the kind of money they wanted, so my area team berated me for not understanding what click and collect meant. I was under the impression it meant that you place an order online and come in store to collect. But obviously I was very much mistaken, as what I SHOULD have been doing was maintain the illusion that we were closed to the public but offer them all of our usual services. Anyway, about a month or so ago my store manager caught COVID. At the time I expressed my frustration to her about us remaining open and the pressure we were being put under to perform, and she agreed wholeheartedly. In her absence, trying to run things legitimately, I faced a lot of backlash from my superiors, and was constantly made to feel like I was wrong for complying with lockdown rules. In pure frustration I decided to report my company to various entities dealing in trading standards. Nothing came of this. The store manager returned to work and soon realised what our superiors had been saying - that following the rules wasn’t making us any money. So she started providing services that weren’t included in our click and collect guidelines. I raised issue with this and she seemed to be under the impression that it wasn’t so much about the law or keeping people safe as it was we were able to do whatever we “felt comfortable” doing. I’ll add that she didn’t directly pressure me into following her belief, but this made it difficult for me when customers would turn up expecting certain services and I was having to turn them away and they couldn’t understand why because my other colleague had eagerly helped them. It was difficult but I let it slide, until this week. This entire time we have had a barrier across our shop to give the impression that we are closed to the public, but my store manager has started sneaking customers in for some services and allowing customers to remove their masks. These services are absolutely not under the click and collect guidelines. She hid the fact that she was doing this from me, but another colleague pointed it out to me and there was evidence through her figures that she had been doing these additional services. I confronted her and her only defence was “I’m sick of not having anything to do and not making any money”. I get that, it’s incredibly demoralising and we are making virtually nothing but that is on our area team and our company as a whole for refusing to close us. Again, frustrated, I decided to file several other reports. This time, something happened. I received a call at work today from Trading Standards and they wanted to speak to the Store Manager. I didn’t glean a lot of information from the conversation but it’s obviously in response to my complaint. I let my manager know that they wanted to speak to her and she started freaking out and told our area manager, who is now going to deal with it tomorrow. I feel immense anxiety and guilt, I feel just plain awful - physically sick with stress over this. And it doesn’t help that my store manager is getting aggravated and suspicious that it was me that tipped off Trading Standards. I was so sure that I was doing the right thing before but now that it’s come down to it I’m wondering whether I should have kept my mouth shut? Am I wrong for reporting my company? Should I have just kept quiet?