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Michael Corkery April 18, 2022
How a Dollar General Employee Went Viral on TikToknytimes.com/2022/04/18/business/dollar-general-tiktok.html
In January 2021, Mary Gundel received a letter from Dollar General’s corporate officecongratulating her for being one of the company’s top-performing employees. In honor of herhard work and dedication, the company gave Ms. Gundel a lapel pin that read, “DG: Top5%.”
“Wear it proudly,” the letter said.
Ms. Gundel did just that, affixing the pin to her black-and-yellow Dollar General uniform, nextto her name badge. “I wanted the world to see it,” she said.
Ms. Gundel loved her job managing the Dollar General store in Tampa, Fla. It was fast-paced, unpredictable and even exciting. She especially liked the challenge of calming downbelligerent customers and pursuing shoplifters. She earned about $51,000 a year, far morethan the median income in Tampa.
But the job had its challenges, too: Delivery trucks that would show up unannounced, leavingboxes piled up in the aisles because there weren’t enough workers to unpack them. Daysspent running the store for long stretches by herself because the company allotted only somany hours for other employees to work. Cranky customers complaining about out of stockitems.
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So on the morning of March 28, in between running the register and putting tags on clothing,Ms. Gundel, 33, propped up her iPhone and hit record.
The result was a six-part critique, “Retail Store Manager Life,” in which Ms. Gundel laid barethe working conditions inside the fast-growing retail chain, with stores that are a commonsight in rural areas.
“Me talking out about this is actually kind of bad,” Ms. Gundel said as she looked into hercamera. “Technically, I could get into a lot of trouble.”
But she added: “Whatever happens, happens. Something needs to be said, and there needsto be some changes, or they are probably going to end up losing a lot of people.”
Her videos, which she posted on TikTok, went viral, including one that has been viewed 1.8million times.
@alwaysmrsgundel #corperateslavery #retail #dobetter #storemanagerlife#storemanagerlife ♬ original sound – ❤AlwaysMrs.Gundel❤
And with that, Ms. Gundel was instantly transformed from a loyal lieutenant in Dollar Generalmanagement into an outspoken dissident who risked her career to describe workingconditions familiar to retail employees across the United States.
As Ms. Gundel had predicted, Dollar General soon fired her. She was let go less than a weekafter posting her first critical video, but not before she inspired other Dollar General storemanagers, many of them women working in stores in poor areas, to speak out on TikTok.
“I am so tired I can’t even talk,” said one woman, who described herself as a 24-year-oldstore manager but did not give her name. “Give me my life back.”
“I’ve been so afraid to post this until now,” another unidentified woman said, as she walkedviewers through a Dollar General store while discussing how she was forced to work alonebecause of labor cuts.
“This will be my last day,” she said, citing Ms. Gundel’s videos. “I am not doing this anymore.”
In a statement, Dollar General said: “We provide many avenues for our teams to make theirvoices heard, including our open-door policy and routine engagement surveys. We use thisfeedback to help us identify and address concerns, improve our workplace and better serveour employees, customers and communities. We are disappointed any time an employeefeels that we have not lived up to these goals and we use those situations as additionalopportunities to listen and learn.
“Although we do not agree with all the statements currently being made by Ms. Gundel, weare doing that here.”
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Before March 28, Ms. Gundel’s TikTok page was a mix of posts about hair extensions andher recent dental surgery. Now it is a daily digest dedicated to fomenting revolt at a majorAmerican company. She’s trying to build what she calls a “movement” of workers who feeloverworked and disrespected and is encouraging Dollar General employees to form a union.
Just about every day, Ms. Gundel announces on TikTok a newly “elected spokesperson” —each one a woman who works for Dollar General or worked there recently — from Arkansas,Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and other places. These women have been assigned toanswer questions and concerns from fellow employees in those states and most are keepingtheir identities hidden because they worry about losing their jobs.
Social media not only gives workers a platform to vent and connect with one another, itempowers rank-and-file workers like Ms. Gundel to become labor leaders in thepostpandemic workplace. Ms. Gundel’s viral videos appeared as Christian Smalls, anAmazon warehouse employee on Staten Island who was derided by the company as “notsmart or articulate,” organized the first major union in Amazon history last month.
Ms. Gundel — who often dyes her hair pink and purple and has long painted nails that sheuses to slice open packaging at work — has been able to break through, it seems, becauseother workers see themselves in her.
“Everyone has their breaking point,” she said in a telephone interview. “You can only feelunappreciated for so long.”
Ms. Gundel planned on a long career at Dollar General when she started working in her firststore in Georgia three years ago. She has three children, including one who is autistic, andher husband works at a defense contractor. She grew up in Titusville, Fla., near CapeCanaveral. Her mother was a district manager at the Waffle House restaurants. Hergrandmother worked in the gift store at the Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Gundel moved toTampa as a Dollar General store manager in February 2020, just before the pandemic.
The store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a staff of about seven people,she said. But by the end of last month, she had only about 130 hours to allocate, whichequated to one full-time employee and one part-time employee fewer than when she started.
With not as many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often had to operate the store on herown for long stretches, typically working six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtimepay.
Ms. Gundel’s protest was prompted by a TikTok video posted by a customer complainingabout the disheveled state of a Dollar General store. Ms. Gundel had heard these complaintsfrom her own customers. Why are boxes blocking the aisles? Why aren’t the shelves fullystocked?
She understood their frustration. But the blame on employees is misplaced, she said.
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“Instead of getting mad at the people working there, trying to handle all of their workload,why don’t you say something to the actual big people in the company?” Ms. Gundel said onTikTok. “Why don’t you demand more from the company so they actually start funding thestores to be able to get all this stuff done?”
Ms. Gundel soon tapped into a network of fellow employees, some of whom had alreadygone public about challenges at work. They included Crystal McBride, who worked at aDollar General in Utah and had made a video that showed her store’s dumpster overflowingwith trash that people had deposited there.
“Thanks, guys, for adding some more dirty work for me,” Ms. McBride, 37, said in her post.
She said in an interview that Dollar General had fired her earlier this month, and that hermanager had warned her about some of her videos. As someone who had walked out of anabusive relationship with “just the clothes on my back” and lost her 11 year-old daughter tocancer in 2018, “I wasn’t afraid of losing my job,” she said. “I was not going to be silenced.”
Neither was Ms. Gundel. As her online following grew, she kept posting more videos, manyof them increasingly angry.
She talked about a customer who had pulled a knife on her and a man who had reached intoher car in the store parking lot and tried yanking her through the window.
She said the company’s way of avoiding serious issues was to bury them in bureaucracy.“You know what they tell you? ‘Put in a ticket,’” she said.
Ms. Gundel started using the hashtag #PutInATicket, which other TikTok users tagged in theirown videos.
On the night of March 29, Ms. Gundel posted a video, saying her boss had called her thatday to discuss her videos. He told her to review the company’s social media policy, she said.She told him that she was well aware of the policy.
“I was not specifically told to take my videos down, but it was recommended,” she said in thevideo. “To save my job and future career and where I want to go.”
She closed her eyes for a moment.
“I had to respectfully decline” to remove the videos, she said. “I feel like it would be againstmy morals and integrity to do so.”
Ms. Gundel also got a call from one of the senior executives who had sent her the “DG: 5%”pin she had been so proud of. Ms. Gundel insisted on recording the call to protect herself.The executive said she just wanted to talk through Ms. Gundel’s concerns, but didn’t want tobe recorded. The call ended politely but quickly.
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On April 1, Ms. Gundel reported to work at 6 a.m. “Guess what,” she said in a post fromoutside the store. “I just got fired.”
She added, “It’s pretty sad that a store manager or anybody has to go viral on a social mediasite in order to be listened to, in order to get some help in their store.”
Ms. Gundel continues to post videos regularly and recently started driving for Uber and Lyft.
While Ms. Gundel’s unionizing effort may be an uphill effort, some people say she hasalready had an impact. In one recent TikTok video, a woman shopping at a Dollar General inFlorida credited Ms. Gundel with forcing the company to spruce up the store she shops in.
“Look at the refrigerators — everything’s stacked in there,” the woman said as her camerapanned the aisles. “They’ve got toilet paper to the roof, y’all.”
“Thank you, Mary, for going viral and holding your ground and standing up to corporate andlosing your job, because it wasn’t done in vain,” she said. “I’m proud to go into a DollarGeneral now, because look at it. Look at it.”
