In January 2021, Mary Gundel received a letter from Dollar General headquarters 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 reads “DG: Top 5%.”
“Wear it with pride,” the letter read.
Miss Gundel did that by sticking the pin next to her name badge on her black and yellow Dollar General uniform. “I wanted the world to see it,” she said.
Ms. Gundel loved her job as the manager of the Dollar General store in Tampa, Florida. It was fast, unpredictable and even exciting. She especially loved the challenge of calming combative customers and chasing down shoplifters. She earned about $51,000 a year, far more than the average income in Tampa.
But the job also had its challenges: vans showing up unannounced and piling boxes in the aisles because there weren’t enough workers to unpack them. Days spent running the store alone for long periods of time, as the company only allocated a limited number of hours for other employees to work. Grumpy customers complaining about out-of-stock items.
So on the morning of March 28, between checking the cash register and labeling clothes, Ms. Gundel, 33, put on her iPhone and hit record.
The result was a six-part critique, ‘Retail Store Manager Life’, in which Ms Gundel exposed working conditions within the fast-growing retail chain, with stores common in rural areas.
“That I’m talking about it is actually kind of bad,” Ms. Gundel said, looking into her camera. “Technically I could get in a lot of trouble.”
But she added: “Whatever happens, happens. Something has to be said and some changes have to come, otherwise they will probably lose a lot of people.”
Her videos, which she posted to TikTok, went viral, including one that has been viewed 1.8 million times.
And with that, Ms. Gundel immediately went from a loyal lieutenant in Dollar general management to an outspoken dissident who risked her career to describe working conditions familiar to store associates in the United States.
As Mrs. Gundel had predicted, Dollar General soon fired her. She was fired less than a week after posting her first critical video, but not before inspiring other Dollar General store managers, including many women who work in stores in poor areas, to speak out on TikTok.
“I’m so tired I can’t even talk,” said one woman, who described herself as a 24-year-old store manager but didn’t give her name. “Give me my life back.”
“I’ve been so scared to post this until now,” said another unidentified woman, as she walked viewers through a Dollar General store discussing how she was forced to work alone because of unemployment benefits.
“This will be my last day,” she said, citing Ms Gundel’s videos. “I don’t do this anymore.”
In a statement, Dollar General said, “We provide many opportunities for our teams to make their voices heard, including our open door policies and routine engagement surveys. We use this feedback to help us identify and address issues, improve our workplace and improve our better serve employees, customers and communities Whenever an employee feels we have not met these goals, we are disappointed and we use these situations as additional opportunities to listen and learn.
“While we disagree with all the statements currently being made by Ms Gundel, we do so here.”
Before March 28, Ms. Gundel’s TikTok page was a mix of posts about hair extensions and her recent dental surgery. Now it’s a daily digest devoted to fomenting insurrection at a major American company. She tries to build a “movement” of workers who feel overworked and disrespected, and encourages Dollar General employees to form a union.
Just about every day, Ms. Gundel announces on TikTok a new “elected spokesperson”—each a woman who works or has recently worked for Dollar General—from Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and other places. These women have been hired to answer questions and concerns from colleagues in those states, and most are keeping their identities hidden because they are concerned about losing their jobs.
Social media not only provides workers with a platform to vent and connect with each other, it empowers ordinary workers like Ms. Gundel to become union leaders in the post-pandemic workplace. The viral videos of Mrs. Gundel showed up when Christian Smalls, an Amazon warehouse worker in Staten Island who was derided by the company as “not smart or articulate,” organized the first major union in Amazon’s history last month.
Ms. Gundel — who often dyes her hair pink and purple and has long painted nails with which she cuts packages at work — has made her breakthrough, it seems, because other employees see themselves in her.
“Everyone has their breaking point,” she said in a telephone interview. “You can only feel unappreciated for so long.”
Ms. Gundel planned a long career at Dollar General when she started working in her first store in Georgia three years ago. She has three children, including one who is autistic, and her husband works for a defense contractor. She grew up in Titusville, Florida, near Cape Canaveral. Her mother was a district manager at the Waffle House restaurants. Her grandmother worked in the gift shop at the Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Gundel moved to Tampa in February 2020, just before the pandemic, as Dollar General Store Manager.
The store used to have about 198 hours a week to devote to a staff of about seven people, she said. But by the end of last month, she only had about 130 hours left, which was one full-time employee and one part-time employee less than when she started.
With not so many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often run the store alone for long periods, usually working six days and up to 60 hours a week without paying overtime.
The protest of Mrs. Gundel was prompted by a TikTok video posted by a customer complaining about the shabby condition of a Dollar General store. Ms. Gundel had heard these complaints from her own customers. Why do boxes block the aisles? Why are the shelves not properly stocked?
She understood their frustration. But the blame on the workers is misplaced, she said.
“Why don’t you say something to the really big people in the company instead of getting mad at the people who work there and taking on all their workload?” said Ms. Gundel on TikTok. “Why don’t you ask more of the company so that they actually start funding the stores to get all these things done?”
Ms. Gundel soon tapped into a network of colleagues, some of whom had already gone public about challenges at work. Among them was Crystal McBride, who worked at a Dollar General in Utah and had shot a video showing her store’s dumpster overflowing with trash that people had deposited there.
“Thank you 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 her manager had warned her about some of her videos. As someone who’d walked out of an abusive relationship with “just the clothes on my back” and lost her 11-year-old daughter to cancer in 2018, “I wasn’t afraid of losing my job,” she said. “I wasn’t going to shut up.”
Not even Mrs. Gundel. As her online following grew, she posted more and more videos, many of them getting angrier.
She told of a customer who pulled a knife on her and a man who grabbed her car in the store’s parking lot and tried to yank her through the window.
She said the company’s way of avoiding serious problems was to bury them in bureaucracy. ‘Do you know what they tell you? “Put in a ticket,” she said.
Ms. Gundel started using the hashtag #PutInATicket, which other TikTok users have tagged in their own videos.
On the night of March 29, Ms. Gundel posted a video stating that her boss had called her that day to discuss her videos. He told her to review the company’s social media policies, she said. She told him she was well aware of the policy.
“I wasn’t specifically told to remove my videos, but it was recommended,” she said in the video. “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 have the videos removed, she said. “I feel it would be against my morals and integrity to do that.”
Ms. Gundel also received a call from one of the senior executives who had sent her the “DG: 5%” pin that she had been so proud of. Mrs. Gundel insisted on recording the call to protect herself. The director said she just wanted to talk about Ms. Gundel’s concerns, but didn’t want to be admitted. The conversation ended politely but quickly.
On April 1, Mrs. Gundel that she was working at 6 in the morning. “Guess what,” she said in a message from outside the store. “I just got fired.”
She added: “It’s pretty sad that a store manager or anyone else has to go viral on a social media site to be listened to, to get help in their store.”
Ms. Gundel continues to post videos regularly and has recently started driving for Uber and Lyft.
Although Mrs. Gundel’s union effort may be an arduous one, some say she’s already had an impact. In a recent TikTok video, a woman who shopped at a Dollar General in Florida, Ms. Gundel, said she forced the company to refurbish the store she shops in.
“Look at the refrigerators, everything’s stacked up there,” the woman said as her camera flashed down the aisles. “They’ve got toilet paper up to the roof, all of you.”
“Thank you, Mary, for going viral and standing your ground, standing up to corporate and losing your job, because it wasn’t in vain,” she said. “I’m proud to be going to a Dollar General now, because look at that. Look at it.”
