'[The restaurant] lost 4 cooks on Super Bowl Sunday': 20 Workplaces whose employees banded together and quit en masse

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jul 30, 2023 5:00 PM EDT

These workplaces found out the hard way that you can only push your employees so far before they snap. People can only take so much poor treatment before they decide, "I'm out of here." And in the case of these people, their coworkers quitting created a domino effect that led to numerous walkouts. 

When workplaces become toxic, it feels like it's every worker for themself. It seems like no one has your back, because everyone has their own agendas. Some people will start gossiping behind everyone else's backs, which is also bad for morale. Other employees take a different approach, and will try to suck up to the management team. So by the time all these employees band together to abandon a company, it's probably been months of misery and discontent. 

However, going through difficult times can really bring people together — you might even look back on those times and laugh at the hilarity of it all. These people told their stories of the incident in their workplace that made everyone quit all at once. Scroll down to check out these 20 great stories from people across various industries. Then, this employee was incredibly dedicated to their nonprofit job, until the organization turned on them.

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  • 01
    Font - r/AskReddit . Posted by u/PegBundys BonBons S3 What happened at your work which caused multiple people to all quit at once?
    via u/PegBundysBonBons
  • 02
    Font - richardkim_nyc. The boss went off on a tirade on me for something that wasn't my fault and I got him to scream "people like you are expendable pieces in this company and I can replace you tomorrow if I wanted to". 80% of the engineers quit the next day. Simply didn't show up. Including me. From what I know, the entire project folded because my now ex boss couldn't find people to replace us because no one wanted to do the kind of work he was looking for at the salary he was paying.
    via u/richardkim_nyc
  • 03
    Font - skribsbb I had worked at a grocery store for about 3 years before moving from Courtesy Clerk (basically bagger + custodian) to Helper Clerk (stocker). The grocery department wanted to save costs on personnel, but couldn't fire anyone or lay anyone off due to the union. So they started cutting back hours and literally told us "when someone quits, everyone else will get more hours."
    via u/skribsbb
  • 04
    Font - We were supposed to be 40-hour employees and they had us at 32 hours. 2 people quit and we were down to 24 hours. A third person quit, down to 16 hours. I don't know what their plan was, but they didn't give us more hours as people left.
    via u/skribsbb
  • 05
    Font - o CaptainJudaism Canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (financial and HR), and his son (utterly useless IT) in a year where we have record profits and brought in almost double the clients on top of announcing they aren't looking to hire more people when we were already overwhelmed. Good part about it was when the majority of us quit they lost almost every single client shortly afterwards to their competitors and the company is now defunct.
    via u/CaptainJudaism
  • 06
    Font - Armyofducks94 Word slipped out that the whole accounting department was being replaced so they all resigned all at once.
    via u/Armyofducks94
  • 07
    Font - has-space We stopped providing free coffee, and we're so cheap that we sold our coffee maker. This was in Seattle, so a couple of people bought their own coffee makers to put in their cubes. That tripped the breakers several times so it was very disruptive since our computers would shut down. Management then said no coffee allowed in the office at all. We lost four very good engineers.
    via u/has-space
  • 08
    Font - schnit123 Many years ago in high school I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there. We never got paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy jacka es who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse but after a couple of months they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as
    via u/schnit123
  • 09
    Font - They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public, not to mention that tiny little detail that the projectionists worked around giant, rapidly spinning objects that a tie could get caught in. Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result. They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week
    via u/schnit123
  • 10
    Font - concessions on the weekdays so we wouldn't lose hours. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me. After that they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, things like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 AM every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result. By my count the theater went from a staff of about fif
    via u/schnit123
  • 11
    Font - management staff had been fired and replaced yet again by an entirely new one, ones who actually seemed to be running the theater properly. My best guess is that the previous management had been told to whip the theater into shape and they were idiots who had no idea how to effectively do that.
    via u/schnit123
  • 12
    Font - DkChauncy We just had a company wide (except the Directors of course) pay cut of 20% AND a 4 day work week instead of 5. Everyone one including myself are currently looking for work and they will lose their work force oh so quickly.
    via u/DkChauncy
  • 13
    Font - Nevermind04 W When I was 16, I worked in the concessions stand at a minor league baseball stadium. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15/hr, this job payed $8, and it was always in the evenings so it was perfect work for a high school student. The only bad thing was our management was TERRIBLE. The main manager would throw toddler tantrums about once a shift over stupid bulls like not ordering enough of a specific beer (she did the ordering) or running out of pre-cut lemons for tea.
    via u/Nevermind04
  • 14
    Font - One night the stadium was running a promotion and it was incredibly busy - easily 2- 3x the normal volume of customers. We were all working our ass off handling multiple roles each with absolutely no downtime. Although we all cleaned as we worked, nobody had a chance to do thorough cleaning for the whole shift because of the never-ending horde of hungry baseball fans. The manager showed up 3-4 hours late per usual and throws the biggest ng tantrum ever over the unswept floor. Finally, she
    via u/Nevermind04
  • 15
    Font - you slobs won't clean up anything." Both of our bartenders and the bar back quit on the spot, which caused a chain reaction. We all took off our aprons and hats to leave. She blocked the exit and was red in the face from screaming, so one of the cooks climbed out of one of the big serving windows where we served customers, so I did the same and most of the staff followed. Bear in mind that this all happened in front of like 200+ customers. Of course, my final paycheck "got lost" so I had
    via u/Nevermind04
  • 16
    Font - mariobeans Promised a bonus at the end of the year. Told everyone they will not be giving out bonuses due to the low company performance. Company had a successful year. (Boss was in the middle of building a multi million dollar home, brother in law manager just bought a nice home that year) I quit on the spot. Many others quit soon after.
    via u/mariobeans
  • 17
    Font - Wrong_Answer_Willie. company changed from 5-8 hour shifts to a 12 hour shift rotation. edit: most of the people that quit were the ones that were on straight day shift and didn't want to or couldn't work night shifts.
    via u/Wrong_Answer_Willie
  • 18
    Font - T BO G Abstractpants Oh fing boy I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings for a few years as a line cook. Two different stores, same fing pay. It was the type of work where you ask for a raise and they scoff and say "yeah, me too." Anyways, I had been pretty dead set on quitting sooner or later, our kitchen was very small. Most people ended up closing 4-5 days a week with doubles on the weekends, while still attending school full time as it was a college town.
    via u/Abstractpants
  • 19
    Font - On SUPER BOWL ING SUNDAY, a useless coworker who ducked out in the bathroom most the shift finally stops showing, and in response the managerial staff delegated closing to my pal J. Dude was a fing delight to be around, hands down the best coworker ever. J had told them that due to being a full time student, he no longer wanted to be first in last out (4pm-12am, 1am on the weekends). They basically told him to go f himself, and that they don't have any more shifts for him. Immediately, me
    via u/Abstractpants
  • 20
    Font - Buffalo wild wings lost 4 cooks on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving them with 7 full time students on the schedule. It was a managerial s show.
    via u/Abstractpants
  • 21
    Font - eck226 I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager. I was under the impression that he was moving on to another job somewhere. So after about 4 days I ask him where he's headed and if he's excited. He just looks blankly at me and says "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just training you as the assistant manager, right?". The look I gave him must have been a great tip off because he got up and walked into one of the new owners offices. After about 30 seconds they were screaming
    via u/eck226
  • 22
    Font - Over the next few days I'm trying to calm things with the employees. They're not faulting me, but now have a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 7-10 day time period my team shrank from 15 people down to 3. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering so little we had trouble finding people. After 3 months or so of that I started to get fed up and overwhelmed and when the owners started to g
    via u/eck226
  • 23
    Font - We were still only at 5 people, 2 of which were brand new and still training. They didn't allow me to refuse work or push deadlines out, they expected the same output as a 15 person team. So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.
    via u/eck226
  • 24
    Font - Aloretta_Dethly They laid off half the company with no warning. This included a gentleman who was less than a year from retirement and had been there for 35+ years. The company was shocked when half the remaining people abandoned ship shortly thereafter.
    via u/Aloretta_Dethly
  • 25
    Font - apocalypticradish I did landscape construction. The cheap owner kept taking bigger and bigger projects while never hiring more help. We were all overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious as h. One of our foreman quit and I followed suit a few days later. Two more guys quit the next day. He was down to three guys for the obscene amount of work he wanted to do. Of course a everything gets way behind schedule but he's convinced it's not his fault at all. He went out of business less than a year lat
    via u/apocalypticradish
  • 26
    Font - miltondelug I was working for a very large IT company, before the tech bubble burst we had a meeting with our "new director and the VP" They were tired of people complaining about things that should be changed at the job and how they managed people. So they sat around 200 of us down in our auditorium, and the director said she didn't want to hear anymore complaints on how she was running things and if we didn't like then there was the door and that there was no way we'd leave such a great
    via u/miltondelug
  • 27
    Font - Well there was a mass exodus and probably close to 50 people left within 2 months. She and the VP were "re- orged" and given 0 reports, they were gone after a round of layoffs happened shortly after.
    via u/miltondelug
  • 28
    Font - gore_schach Restructure of the way we're paid. What I used to do involved about 40% client interaction, 20% team/coworker interaction, and 40% paperwork and case coordination stuff. Based on what we do that means only 40% of the time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn't billable. So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Cue management saying we can only make money for the time we have that is actually billable. 1/4th of the departmen
    via u/gore_schach
  • 29
    Font - fuzzyoctopus97 Owners retired, they were literally the greatest people, both very sweet, but kept the place running like a well oiled machine, they took pretty good care of us and their restaurant. When they left, they gave the restaurant over the their nephew who at the time was a busboy/waiter, kind of standoffish, didn't really interact with us too much, a bit lazy at times, but for the most part did and went home, his s he seemed okay. Until he got the power of being the owner, he fir
    via u/fuzzyoctopus97
  • 30
    Font - Friday night just before the dinner rush, all because he 'didn't like their attitude'. He refused to allow people to take vacation that they'd already requested and gotten confirmed by the original owners, would change the schedule randomly without telling anyone and then scream at people when they missed a shift or came in late because of it. He'd refuse to replenish the kitchen until we were literally already out of things, then take forever to put in the orders, he showed up randomly a
    via u/fuzzyoctopus97
  • 31
    Font - with him, together they'd get way out of hand and grab at women and try to start fights. Within the first month of him being the owner, over half the staff had quit, usually walking out literally in the middle of their shifts, after being screamed at, they'd basically throw down their aprons and tell everyone else that they were so sorry but they couldn't do it anymore. After the last cook, this big dude who usually kept the kitchen laughing and running at a decent pace, started crying in
    via u/fuzzyoctopus97
  • 32
    Font - the rest of us just bailed along with him. Four months later the place was closed, his aunt and uncle were absolutely furious and devastated that he'd run the business they'd built up for over 30 years into the ground.
    via u/fuzzyoctopus97
  • 33
    Font - [deleted] They reviewed the cameras back 3 months to catch people coming in less than 3 min late and have them all write ups. Like 20 people walked out across the entire unit
    via u/deleted
  • 34
    Font - Luckboy28 S Worked at a data- company. The guys in the sales department fed around all day. They'd literally be in the parking lot drinking beer and racing RC cars. When it came to handling accounts/clients, they frequently gave away free accounts in order to "retain" customers (and make their own sales numbers look good), and somehow they got away with it.
    via u/Luckboy28
  • 35
    Font - Meanwhile, there were dozens of programmers and database nerds working tirelessly behind the scenes to integrate a bunch of complicated data and make it easy to access via the website. Yearly holiday announcements come around, and upper management decides to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expense-paid vacation. When the furious developers asked why they were just taking the sales team, the confused CEO literally said "Well.. I mean... I guess we could ask the sales team t
    via u/Luckboy28
  • 36
    Font - this year, and take them too..." The programmers/engineers /database people were livid, and walked out in droves. Gee, I wonder why the company tanked.
    via u/Luckboy28
  • 37
    Font - ∞ TopMacaroon Wasn't my office but one in my building. The old CEO retired, he was extremely well loved and very fair. His replacement was a lady not known for her social skills. She hired her sister as the new VP and passed over everyone who was in line for promotions. Literally everyone but the sister and the secretary quit the next week together to go work for a competitor. The former CEO had to come back to try and fix everything, he ended up having to help the new CEO hire basically
    via u/TopMacaroon

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