What It's like to Work at Cold Stone

When Cold Stone came to my town, my friends and classmates couldn't have been more excited. It soon became a popular place to work, as everyone who worked there went to my high school and people didn't seem to ever complain about their job. I thought it looked like a great place to work, so even though I applied out of desperation, it wasn't a job I dreaded.

Turns out, working at Cold Stone isn't as awesome as it looked. Here's a best-kept secret, people who work in service jobs have to nail on a happy face - not only do they have to act happy at work, they're not allowed to complain about the job. It's like being in a cult. Ever. This is why I had to wait until after I got fired to publicly write about what it's really like to work at Cold Stone.

Some may wonder how I could possibly complain about a job that gave me free ice cream. Well, that so-called benefit the company boasts is more of a lie to get people to apply. Yes, an associate can have $5 worth of product, but only during their break, and only if they get a break. In order to get a break, which is no longer than fifteen minutes, your shift has to be six hours. I was hardly ever given shifts that long, which was just as well since I really couldn't take four hours never mind six, but even when I did get a long shift I wasn't always allowed a break because of how busy the store would get.

You see, it was a busy time to work there. Our franchise was just down the street from Fenway Park. Baseball season had just started and we were starting to see warm days. Even then, we were almost always understaffed, and I think the manager did the schedule like that on purpose. On more than one occasion, I would receive a call asking me to go in hours before my shift was set to start, or my manager would approach me during a night shift asking me if I could pick up an extra shift the next morning. I'm starting to wonder if my one-time refusal to accept the request was part of why I was fired.

I think the big reason I was fired was because of my politics. I'm a marijuana advocate. I'm not a stoner, but I do think marijuana should be legal for both medicinal and recreational purposes. For this reason, I wanted to partake in the Worldwide Marijuana March in May, and I asked for the day off in order to participate. My manager found out why, and next time the schedule was sent out, I wasn't on it. When I e-mailed asking why, the manager got frustrated and said "it's just not working out." In italics, and possibly bold as well, I can't remember.

Maybe another part of it was my inflexibility. It wasn't that I couldn't stay up late enough to work until close, I had to walk home. I'm a student at Northeastern, and I was working in the Fenway area. My choices were hop on a D train, take it to Copley and switch to an E train, which was safe but would have taken forever. It was cheaper and faster just to walk home along the Fens. Not exactly safe, which I only hoped my manager would understand. Maybe I asked for too many days off, though I tried not to. Taking time off meant getting to the calendar as soon as possible and hoping there was an empty slot where you wanted it. They had a dry erase calendar up, and if you wanted a day off you needed to put your name on it, in one of the three available slots. If you wanted a day off and there were already three names on it, you were pretty much outta luck.

I can't say I was the most competent member of the crew. I still don't know how some people did it. They expected me to learn the sizes so quickly - and they're not as easy as one scoop, two scoops, three scoops, that would be easy. No, the sizes were done by weight which we needed to get a "feel for" using a scale and plastic container (in front of the customers) before we could serve, and when I was getting the feel for them, I felt rushed; my trainer kept asking me "okay do you know it yet? Are you ready to start serving?" And I really should have taken my time because I was mostly crap at sizes. I would often serve too little and the people would complain, but if I gave too much the manager would complain. In my three weeks before getting fired I never got it down.

Mixing took more skill than I thought too. Some ice creams are hard, mostly the chocolate flavored ice cream, and take forever just to pull. Mixing sounds simple on the surface, "chop, chop, fold, fold" or something like that. Well, being someone who's always mixed her ice cream until it was perfectly blended, I erred on the side of taking too long mixing, resulting in a final product that was too soft and soupy rather than only taking five seconds and giving someone a barely mixed product.