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In January 2021, Mary Gundel received a letter from Dollar General’s general office congratulating her for being one of the company’s top performing employees. In honor of her hard work and dedication, the company gave Ms. Gundel a lapel pin that read “DG: Top 5%”.
The letter read, “Dress with pride.”
Miss Gundel did just that, affixing the badge to her black-and-yellow Dollar General uniform next to her badge. “I wanted the world to see it,” she said.
Ms. Gundel loved the job of running the Dollar General store in Tampa, Fla. It was fast, unpredictable, and even exciting. She especially liked the challenge of calming belligerent customers and chasing down thieves. Much more than the average income in Tampa, she earned about $51,000 per year.
But the job also had its challenges: Unannounced delivery trucks, boxes piled up in the aisles because there weren’t enough workers to open them. Long days spent running the store alone, as the company devotes only so many hours to other employees working. Grumpy customers complain about out-of-stock items.
On the morning of March 28, between opening the cash register and attaching labels to clothes, 33-year-old Ms. Gundel braced her iPhone and set a record.
The result was “The Life of a Retail Store Manager,” a six-part critique in which Ms. Gundel made clear the working conditions within the fast-growing retail chain with stores common in rural areas.
“It’s actually kind of bad for me to talk about it,” said Miss Gundel as she stared at her camera. “Technically, I could get in a lot of trouble.”
But he added: “Whatever happens, it happens. Something has to be said and some changes made, or they will probably lose a lot of people.”
His videos, which he posted on TikTok, went viral, including one that was viewed 1.8 million times.
And with that, Miss Gundel has turned from a staunch lieutenant in the Dollar General administration to an outspoken dissident who risks her career to explain the working conditions familiar to retail workers in the United States.
As Miss Gundel predicted, Dollar General fired him soon after. He was let go less than a week after he posted his first critical video, but not before he inspired other Dollar General store managers, many of whom work in stores in impoverished areas, to talk about TikTok.
“I’m too tired to talk,” said a 24-year-old woman who described herself as a store manager, but did not give her name. “Give me my life back.”
“I was so scared to air this until now,” another unidentified woman said as she walked the audience through a Dollar General store discussing how she was forced to work alone due to job cuts.
“This will be my last day,” he said, referring to Ms. Gundel’s videos. “I don’t do this anymore.”
“We provide many ways for our teams to make their voices heard, including our open door policy and routine engagement surveys. We use this feedback to help us identify and address concerns, improve our workplace, and better serve our people, customers and communities,” Dollar General said in a statement. When an employee feels we are not meeting these goals, we become frustrated and use these situations as additional opportunities to listen and learn.
“Although we do not agree with all of the statements made by Ms. Gündel at the moment, we are doing this here.”
Before March 28, Ms. Gundel’s TikTok page was a mix of posts about hair growth and recent dental surgery. Now a daily rundown devoted to fomenting rebellion at a major American company. She is trying to form a “movement” that feels overworked and disrespected, and Dollar General encourages its employees to form a union, she.
Almost every day, Ms. Gundel announces on TikTok new “elected spokespersons”—a woman each who works or has recently worked for Dollar General—from Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and more. These women are tasked with answering the questions and concerns of their colleagues in these states, and many remain anonymous because they fear losing their jobs.
Social media not only gives workers a platform to communicate with each other, but also empowers ordinary workers like Ms. Gundel to become worker leaders in the post-pandemic workplace. Ms. Gundel’s viral videos emerged as follows: Christian JuniorsAn Amazon warehouse employee in Staten Island, mocked by the company for being “not smart or outspoken”, 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 she uses to cut open packaging at work, apparently succeeded because other workers saw them in her.
“Everyone has a breaking point,” he said in a phone interview. “You may just feel underappreciated for too long.”
Ms. Gundel planned a long career at Dollar General when she started working at her first store in Georgia three years ago. She has three children, one of whom is autistic, and her husband works in a defense contracting firm. She grew up in Titusville, Fla., near Cape Canaveral. His mother was the regional manager at Waffle House restaurants. His grandmother worked in the gift shop at Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Gundel moved to Tampa as a Dollar General store manager in February 2020, just before the pandemic.
He said the store has about 198 hours a week to devote to a staff of about seven. But at the end of last month, he only had about 130 hours to allocate, which equates to less than one full-time employee and one part-time employee from when he started.
Not having many hours to devote to her staff, Ms. Gundel had to run the store herself for long periods of time, often working up to 60 hours a week, six days a week, often without overtime pay.
Ms. Gundel’s protest was triggered by a TikTok video posted by a customer complaining about the messy state of the Dollar General store. Ms. Gundel had heard these complaints from her own clients. Why do boxes block aisles? Why are the shelves not fully loaded?
He understood their disappointment. But the accusation on the employees is unfounded, he said.
“Instead of getting mad at the people who work there, trying to handle all their workloads, why don’t you just say something to the real great people at the company?” Miss Gundel said on TikTok. “Why don’t you demand more from the company so they start funding stores to be able to do all this?”
Ms. Gundel soon entered a network of co-workers, some of whom were already public about the challenges at work. Among them was Crystal McBride, who worked at Dollar General in Utah and made a video showing her store’s trash can overflowing with garbage people piled up there.
“Thanks guys for adding me some more dirty work,” Mrs McBride, 37, said in her post.
In an interview, he said that Dollar General fired him earlier this month and his manager warned him about some of his videos. “I wasn’t afraid to lose my job,” she said, as someone who lost her 11-year-old daughter to cancer in 2018 and walked out of an abusive relationship with ‘just clothes on my back’. “I wouldn’t stay silent.”
Neither was Miss Gundel. As the number of followers on the Internet grew, he continued to post more videos, and many of them became increasingly angry.
He mentioned a customer pulling a knife at him, and a man reaching into his car in the store parking lot trying to pull him out the window.
He said the company’s way of avoiding serious problems was to bury them in bureaucracy. “You know what they call you? ‘Put a ticket,’ he said.
Gundel started using the hashtag #PutInATicket, which other TikTok users tagged in their videos.
On the night of March 29, Ms. Gundel posted a video saying that her boss had called her that day to discuss her videos. She told the company to review its social media policy, she said. She said she knew politics very well.
“I wasn’t specifically told to remove my videos, but was advised,” he said in the video. “To save my job and my future career and where I want to go.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“I had to respectfully decline,” he said, in order to remove the videos. “I feel it would be against my morals and integrity to do so.”
Ms. Gundel also received a call from one of the senior executives who sent her the “DG: 5%” badge she was proud of. Ms. Gundel insisted on recording the call to protect herself. The manager said he just wanted to talk about Ms. Gundel’s concerns, but didn’t want to be recorded. The meeting ended politely but quickly.
On April 1, Ms. Gundel reported that she was working at 6 o’clock, “Guess what,” she said in a post from outside the store. “I just got fired.”
“It’s pretty sad that a store manager, or anyone else, has gone viral on a social media site just to be able to get some help with their store so they can rest,” he added.
Ms. Gundel continues to post videos regularly and has recently started driving for Uber and Lyft.
While Ms. Gundel’s effort to unionize is an uphill effort, some people say she’s already having an impact. In a recent TikTok video, a woman shopping at Dollar General in Florida trusted Ms. Gundel, who forced the company to spruce up the store she was shopping at.
“Look at the refrigerators—everything’s piled up there,” the woman said as her camera swept the halls. “There’s toilet paper on the roof, folks.”
“Thank you, Mary, for going viral, holding your ground and standing up for the company and losing your job, because it wasn’t done in vain,” she said. “I’m proud to be a Dollar General now because look at this. Look at him.”
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