Six dollar a scoop? or Six dollar a tub? You decide.

I used to work at Coldstone, the famous ice cream store where the product is made right in front of your face on a frozen tablet of yummy goodness. It was also famous for creating overly dedicated j.p licks fans and overpriced servings of ice cream. I mean to me, ice cream is ice cream. Wherever you get it, as long as it's cheap and good, I'm all for it. I like J.P Licks and I like Coldstone, both are great ice cream stores but for fucks sake is Coldstone expensive! At least I can get a single scoop at j.p licks for just a little over a dollar...I believe a single scoop at coldstone is about 3 bucks in a cup.

I mean some people are willing to pay for the show, the various condiments of choice, and the obnoxious singing...but me? hells the fuck no. I only go there with my friend during the winter when they don't make any profit and only if she got a free coupon for a buy one get one free deal in one of her seventeen magazines. I think that's probably the best deal out of coldstone. You buy one any size you want and you get one the same size for free. So my friend and I would buy the largest size possible in the coldest weather possible and manage to shove it down our freezing throats. Hey, it's practically free.

So at camp today, I was telling my friends about my experience working for the dreaded company. I stayed for about a month's time and immediately quit right after. I was so desperate to get a job and just to earn some cash. There was a new Coldstone opening near one of the malls in the city and I figured I should give it a try. I got the job immediately...and so did everyone else. There were at least 40 plus workers hired for that tiny store located in the corner of the mall. Actually, it wasn't even inside the mall. It was outside, attached, on the side, and you had to go outside in order to actually go inside the store. Anyway, it was real small. The interview wasn't even an one on one. It was a group interview and there must've been at least 20 people in the room. We had to watch long videos, make-up songs, dance for show, and learn the rules of the company. In the end, it didn't matter because we all got the job anyway.

Training was the worst though. For three days, we learned how to watch dishes and picture this, there was about 20 people pushed up against each other in the back room attempting to sneak a peak at what was going on at the sink. So that was that and eventually we got to learn how to portion our scoops, make the ice cream and memorize the amounts. The managers were really anal about us memorizing the different combinations of ice cream flavors. We were forced to make flash cards with cheesy names of the signature company flavors like: birthday cake remix, cheesecake fantasy, strawberry banana rendevous, COOKIE DOUGHN'T YOU WANT SOME? They would test each and every one of us in the back room. They would ask us the cardinal rules of customer service (and there some sort of acronym for this shit THanks bumpkinz). I passed, thankfully or else i wouldn't have gotten any hours...but i never got any anyway.

I would show up to work about once a week around 11 o clock. There wouldn't be too many people in the morning and my coldstone managers decided to open the coldstone in the dead of winter so there were no customers. Yet they still thought the store needed an extra 10 employees standing around doing nothing so that they could have the power of telling us we're useless and send us home. I never learned how to use the cash register except through the online exercise which is isn't the same as the people actually teaching me. I mostly stayed in the back washing dishes anyway because by the time it hit 12 o clock, 6 more employees would clock in to work alongside the first four who were working till 4. Everyone wanted the chance to be the server but I could care less as long as I got my pay check in the end.

Very rarely did I have the opportunity to actually serve the customers without someone pushing me out of the serving line. Almost eryone in the store were coldstone enthusiasts except me and my friend alice. On my first day, people literally pushed me to serve the first customer and I had no idea what I was doing. Of course, they thought they were doing me a favor when actually they made a complete fool out of me. After that, everyone just considered me as a nuisance. What? my first fucking customer? sorry if I didn't memorize the damn manual and I don't have a fake smile on my face every minute of my day. You can't expect me to perfect on my first 15 minutes of work! Anyway, i got over it. When the pay check came though, the manager couldn't even pay me because there wasn't enough money being made. So instead, he cut hours. I worked for a total of 2 hours a week so I said, fuck this. I'd rather quit than trek an hour out to work via train every saturday for nothing. Well whatever, I never followed the rules anyway. They would've fire me eventually.

I served softball sized portions for the smalls and I gave whole snicker bars in the mixings instead of 1/4. I scooped at least 6 strawberries each time and i would grab a handful of m&m's when called for. And here's a direct quote from one of the few customers I served, "Wow, this coldstone serves a lot more ice cream than other coldstones!" Ya know, I figure, if this lady is gonna pay 6 dollars worth of ice cream...then I'm going to fucking give her fucking six dollars worth of ice cream. That's the price of a tub of ice cream at starmarket which in my opinion, I would rather buy than have sprinklings of cookie dough mixed into my nothing of an ice cream portion. I just really believe in paying for things that is worth my money at a reasonable price. So next time you want to indulge in overpriced ice cream, i suggest walking over to the nearest grocery store for a full tub of some good shit.