u/Just_Pea1121

I was working in retail ops. My team was responsible for product displays and shelf/display tags (6k products per location × 35 locations).

For more than 11 years, the whole thing was simple: Excel >> supplier >> finished. Then this year, the design team pushed for a new "premium" template that takes more time, costs more, and the suppliers didn't want to deal with it at all. The ones who agreed were asking for around $4/card.

I spent 4 days teaching myself InDesign's data import feature, figured out the flow, and brought the cost down to 9¢/card. I told my manager that we needed to train a few more people so I wouldn't be the only one who knew how the process worked. My manager (rude, useless, insecure, and a professional bootlicker) said: "This is basically the only task you're handling. Now you want to get rid of it too?"

Then I got seriously sick and took 4 weeks of leave in June, came back, and my manager yelled at me over something he had misunderstood. It was a tiny formatting issue he was convinced I had missed.

I resigned on the spot, and sent an email to the CEO + HR saying that my manager was the reason, and I left on September 3.

Since then, I've received more than 20 calls/texts from the same people asking me to explain to them how to export the tags. I'm just waiting for my final settlement on the 22nd so I can block this whole circus.

A few years ago, I was asked to build an inside sales team. Things went well, and I brought in some really strong people - honestly, better than me at parts of this work. Their success helped the department grow from 5 people at the start to around 24 people in 2025.
On top of that, we're now seen as a talent pipeline, and a few people from my team have moved to other departments. That was one of the best parts of the whole experience: giving people an opportunity and watching them move up.
I've always believed in hiring good people regardless of where they live, so I hired fully remote people in different states, which wasn't how the rest of the company operated. My argument was that it saved money and allowed me to find the strongest candidates instead of only choosing from the strongest candidates who lived within driving distance of the office.
About 5 months ago, one of my remote employees went to the corporate office for a few days of training with a department she was going to start supporting. While she was there, the rest of the company was being told that anyone living within 60 miles of an office had to come back to working from the office two days a week.
About 10 days after she left, HR told me she had been telling HR, the executive assistant, IT, accounting, and basically anyone standing around for a bit that she and another person on my team had permanently moved to Costa Rica... Without telling her direct manager, human resources, IT, or me.
I had to tell both of them that they had to return to the US because of taxes, payroll, legal issues, etc., etc. He said there was no chance he was coming back and resigned. She came back, spent the whole time looking visibly miserable, and then left the job a few weeks ago.
And the whole time, the attitude was: poor me, this isn't fair, why is this happening to me, etc., etc. What sane person walks into the corporate office and announces to half the company: Hey, I moved to another country! She couldn't grasp that she was the one who created the entire problem herself.
Then at the beginning of this month, another remote rep told us he couldn't do a meeting at 12:45 PST. 1:30? No. 2:15? No. 3:30? No. The next morning? No. And he had the audacity, over Teams chat, to tell his direct manager that he only works from 6:30am-12:45 PST Tuesday through Friday and can't be in meetings or calls on Monday because he has his daughter... Our roles have always been 8:30am-5:30pm PST, Monday through Friday. He is salaried and has known from day one that regardless of his time zone, our customers are on PST and those are our working hours.
Stupid things like this that people do are what made the CEO tell me today that I can no longer hire remote employees, and that I also can't keep my team exempt from being in the office. Even my local people had been exempt and were working from home 3-4 days a week.
If you're remote and taking advantage of your company to this extent, I'd like to tell you that you're the reason so many companies no longer trust remote work. You. You're the reason.
Rant over.