Family Dollar Workers Walk Out on The Job, Leaving Store to Shutter: 'Sorry for the Inconvenience' Employees at the Family Dollar in Lincoln, Nebraska quit after citing long hours and low wages.
By Emily Rella
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
As the pandemic continues to wax and wane, retailers, restaurants and other service-oriented companies are finding it difficult to attract and maintain new employees. The result has been longer than usual checkout lines, slow order and delivery times and overworked staff.
For one Family Dollar store in Lincoln, Nebraska, the sum total of stressful conditions led to its workers walking out and quitting — while on the job.
KOLN-TV 10/11 News reporter Jared Austin posted a photo of a sign plastered outside the front door of the Family Dollar store to his Twitter account.
A Family Dollar store near Leighton Ave. has a sign on its door saying everyone has quit. I'll be speaking with a former employee later today. Watch @1011_News at 5:30 and 10 for the full story. pic.twitter.com/N42lIfBDKV
— Jared Austin (@JaredAustin1011) August 8, 2021
The sign, in bright orange paper, read simply, "We all quit! Sorry for the inconvenience!"
Austin confirmed that the store was located near Leighton Ave in Lincoln.
Former employees of Family Dollar and customers of that particular location responded to Austin's findings, most seemingly unsurprised by the dramatic walkout.
One user, who claimed to be a former employee of Family Dollar twice over alleged that the company will "put minimal employees on and give you a ton of work to do and don't care about anything else, and send you two to three trucks a week and expect them done in 24 hours on top of ringing up people, front-facing store and playing security guard."
A former customer of the Lincoln location added that that the store has "had severe staffing issues years before the "nobody wants to work anymore' mantra ever started. This was going to happen eventually."
KOLN reported that the final two remaining employees quit and posted the sign on Sunday, while the manager of the store had left his post four to five days prior.
Related: I Went Viral for Quitting My Job Because It Was Impacting My Mental Health
The store had already cut two hours and started closing at 7 p.m. instead of its usual 9 p.m. on account of staffing shortages. "We got employees hired, they went through the onboarding process, they'd work for us for two days and they'd quit," former Family Dollar employee Breanna Faeller told KOLN of the quick turnaround time. "It was just a never-ending cycle of training people and them quitting."
Faeller also told the outlet that workers had quit due to low wages and overtime hours.
However, KOLN's Austin reported a follow-up on Twitter that the store had reopened.
UPDATE: The Family Dollar off of Leighton Avenue is open for business today. An employee inside tells me he and other workers are helping out from other stores. pic.twitter.com/qTbxuGwU82
— Jared Austin (@JaredAustin1011) August 9, 2021
"An employee inside tells me he and other workers are helping out from other stores," he wrote, alongside a video of the same door with the orange sign removed.
Family Dollar released a statement confirming that the store was back in business. "Our Lincoln neighborhood store is open," the company said. "We are not able to comment on the employment actions or status of individuals."
This is the second time this summer that workers have infamously quit on the clock at a Lincoln, Nebraska-based business, following a July walkout by Burger King employees at one of its locations in the city.
