I worked for these folks for many years!!! I began as crew and grew into the company until I became General Manager. I ran their stores for several years. The years passed and I never got a formal sit down review of my performance. Generally no review means no raise. I wondered how other managers kept getting raises. The pattern was that the majority of them were women. The funny thing was that if they were not women they were gay males. Now don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against gay people. It's their personal choice, and I'm not bothered by it. The thing is that gay people were seemingly being favored over straights. Here's what was taking place. The district manager that goes by the name of Carmen Caro is well known to be lesbian. She is also notoriously know for partying with "her" managers. She has openly maintained personal intimate relationships with several of her subordinate managers. These are people working directly below her. (and I don't mean that symbolically) She first dated a manager known as Mary. Later, Mary got dumped for Perla. Perla was actually straight at some point, but left her husband and moved in with the district manager. That's right!!! A lower level manager living in the district manager's house and holding a conyugal relationship with her. Does anyone see anything wrong with that? What about the rest of that cannot compete with that. I mean who in the right mind would compete under those conditions? Well, Mary wasn't going to go down without a fight, and that's exactly what happened. Mary and Perla went at it during an altercation over who would be the rightful district manager's lover. Perla won. Soon there after, Perla was given the highest salary of all managers by a lot. Some mumbo jumbo was made up about some GM so that her store could be taken away and given to Perla. I came across some reliable info from someone at the central office that stock transfers were being made to favor Perla's store and hurt someone else's, like mine. All stock transfers have to be approved by the district supervisor so that if a stock tranfer has the supervisor's signature on it, it is a done deal. This way the supervisor made Perla's numbers look better than what they actually were. Perla is a person who can't hold a conversation in English but here she is making the highest salary after being a manager for less than two years only because she sleeps with the supervisor. On the other hand are we the dedicated, hard working, English speaking, nine year veterans with the company that have not seen a raise in five years being affected by this situation. I kept an accurate log of all my transfers. I knew when, where , what, and how much I had stock transfered eveey time, but I kept getting discrepancies when the monthly reports came out. I got a hold of a company transfer report. This is a reports that details all transfers between all the stores. Surely enough, there were several large made against my store benefiting Perla's. I shared this info with the owner only to be reprimanded for having "confidential" reports. I was told to stop being jealous of Perla's great performance and start focusing on my food cost issues. The supervisor naturally found out and made it a personal mission to go after me. She would show up at my store and complain about the smallest of issues like "this mandarin ckn salad has three too many mandarin wedges" and stuff like that. After about a month of continuous persecution, she told me that I could voluntarily step down or that she would find a way to make it happen. There was an incident at my store where two employees were kidding around and one of them fell down. It is company policy that any incident requiring an accident report need to be announced to the supervisor. I did my job. I wrote up the employees involved and I called the supervisor to ler her know what happened. She told me to fire one of the two employees. I did. Two days later, the employee called human resources up at corporate stating that I had wrongfully terminated him. The supervisor came to my store with the owner to let me know that the incident was "a clear indication that the store was not being handled in the best of ways" so that I was to be relieved of my position immediately. I protested intensely stating that I had been instructed to terminate the employee by her. She denied this and I was again reprimanded for making up such stories. She then suggested that I be sent to Perla's store so that I could be re-trained on how to run a store. Can you imagine the humiliation. I had more that four times the amount of experience and speak English. I was devastated. I began work at Perla's store were my fabulous retraining was reduced to spending ten almost uninterrupted hours running the grill five days a week. I seized to perform all managerial duties. I was forced to work under the care of incompetent shift managers that had months if not weeks of working with the company. How did they become managers so fast? You guessed it! They were gay. In fact, Perla's team consisted of six managers out of which five were either gay or lesbian. Her crew also consisted of an unusually high number of gay individuals. During the weeks at Perla's store, she came in late often, she left early almost on a daily basis and she called in on at least three occasions. I called in sick for the first time in years and got a write up for it!!!! On a rough day when Perla had called in, the owner paid a visit and the store was not running right. I was put on probation because "I was the senior manager on hand and had done nothing to correct the situation". Remember that I was only a grillman working under the command of a futile shift manager. I finally landed a job that paid comparably to the one I was hanging on to. I finally stopped showing up without notice. The day I went to pick my final check, the owner told me that he was deeply disappointed that I had left without letting him know. I replied that I was infinitely more disappointed in the way he had allowed his company to be run. I am not the only that suffered the same fate. At least three other GMs were hunted down around the same time that I was. I am happily employed now and only wanted to share my experiences while working for these people hoping that it might change someone's mind about working for this company.