TLDR; Company is in death mode as we speak. Sunk my heart and soul along with my sanity over a 2 year period. Company wide layoffs started yesterday.
For the entire duration I had been there there was constant talks that we weren’t making enough money and that we needed to show profitability to ensure sustainability. In the same breath always spoke about the want to help value the team better but only once we were profitable.
This unfortunately never happened on my entire tenure as more and more was stripped away from the team. Promises for career development in areas of marketing, and production work through the company became increasingly blurred as they cut costs all across the boards including cleaning services. Essentially this turned the guide position, one that was promised to be a highly customer service forward and engaging experience, into a lonely dead end janitorial job. Last summer after a mass exodus of employees all the guides were told that our availabilities and outside commitments of the job would no longer be honored and that all employees were expected to work at their leisure with a mixture of morning and night shifts with no real consistency at all to a single persons schedule. This on top of being brutally understaffed became the point of no recovery for the overall morale of the place. A constant rotation of 1 or 2 new employees followed by even more quitting led to an insanely toxic work environment and as communication between the ground level up to management and HQ became virtually non existent pretty much everybody knew that our jobs would be in jeopardy very very soon.
As the decline in communication persisted the only updates we would receive was a near monthly change in our operating hours that would often time conflict with the already extremely tight schedule and cause some shifts to be run with a manager and a singular guide. Time and time again we heard that we must meet our hottest demand and adjust our operating hours accordingly.
The biggest kicker of it all as this to the owner meant attempting to stay open all days of the week and to stay open later and later despite zero evidence that there was any demand at all. Many of times during weekdays it felt just like hanging out with my friends at work as we waited hours in between bookings with simply not a thing to do besides sit around and get paid for it. We historically attracted the most attention during the mid afternoon time and would rarely get any sizable bump in visitorship past 6pm. Being forced to work late night shifts often times there were multiple occurrences of completely unsafe situations happening like theft, violence, and other caveats of late nights in a dangerous city. I feared almost everytime leaving that place at 11:30 at night and not once were those fears and pleads for a little humanity in our schedules were heard. All the while we were simply not attracting enough people at any given time of the day let alone any for our late night time slots on most weekdays and often times weekends as well. Wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that paying all that overhead for extremely little result would mean it’s not the accessibility of the show but rather the product making the company struggle. When I first started we were presented with a monthly survey that allowed an anonymous outlet to give feedback on the company, good and bad. Time and time again the team banded together to highlight key issues with safety, work life balance, and structural issues with the company that just plain did not make sense. After all of these surveys we would do a team all hands meetings in the venue and go over survey results as well as talk about any changes. Nearly every single one involved a gigantic blame fest on the guides for not believing the mission of the company and not trying hard enough to get people engaged while we were on the floor. When giving pushback on nonsense policies and changes through the company the owner was defended as some sort of god like figure who could do no wrong and that he cares about the team more then we think. To provide a bit of context the HQ portion of this company operates out of Los Angeles and runs 3 venues in Texas, Arizona, and Philly. Despite the obvious stupidity of trying to franchise the same exact product across the country this made the communication extremely fragmented and confusing. Every single quarter we had a quarterly full team all hands over zoom where the owner himself would talk most of the time and ramble about extremely confusing changes with no real timetable or explanation to what was actually happening but rather a regurgitation of a string of ideas with no bones or structure to them. I had to sit there and listen to a 45 minute long explanation as to why we call our guests visitors and I left the meeting extremely puzzled as to how somebody could turn something that shouldn’t matter at all into a rant that long. I had my doubts but it this moment I realized I was working for an absolute control freak who simply wanted more brainwashed minions for his “dream”. All venues look exactly the same, operate exactly the same, forced to use the same vocabulary, and in many cases showcase the same exact artwork. This combined with extremely slow action to make any sort of structural and content based changes to the company left the Philly location most specifically as an absolute massive bleed of money.
Work life balance was absolute trash and the owner tried every way possible to make sure that if you worked at wonderspaces you were gonna be absolutely miserable while doing it. Every single aspect of the job was micromanaged down to the vocabulary we used when communicating via slack. The owner took an extremely authoritarian approach to his management style in which if you werent doing your job the exact way that he wanted you to do it you were gonna hear about it. And of course not by him but by rather one of his minions that he was able to brainwash into believing the pipe dream that this place always was and defending him with their last breath. Managers were genuinely afraid to speak their mind about issues with the company in fear of retaliation from a man who shows and knows zero emotion. Things as simple as placing signage on the many things that were broken/inoperable in the venue required asking daddy Jason first and waiting for some extremely long winded, borderline rambling response all for him to just say no anyways. This followed all the way to things even including kicking out aggressive, racist, and a multitude of troublesome folks that had visited in my time there. Somebody could be on top of you beating the living s out of you and all that would happen is they would call security for the mall, wait 25 minutes for them to show up, all while anxiously pacing waiting for a message back from the owner on what to do with said person.
This job was a completely new field for me and having zero art background I had to really buy into the idea with an open mind and try and use the skills I had from previous employment while attempting to sharpen all these new skills I was learning. I tried at every single aspect of the job to really stick my neck out as an individual and show that I can be of great use to the team. Something I took a liking to was the artwork installing portion of the job. At the time of starting there wasn’t any sort of official title but multiple guides were given the role of production and would come in on the soon to be gone dark day and maintain the artwork as well as install new artwork around the space. Having prior experience in other hands on fields I was able to feel comfortable with something I knew like the back of my hand while also being exposed to exciting world of immersive art and learning everything I could about it. I begged and pleaded for weeks trying to grab any production shift that I could possibly get so that I could show that I had the skills necessary to make a real impact on the team. My wish was granted and I eventually was consistently a part of maintaining what we had and I was excited as ever that I was really starting to drink the Kool-Aid at this point. When I had started the verbiage that I was given for how often the artwork was changed out around the space was 1 every 60-90 days. Being spoon fed stories of past installs by management and seeing the scale of work on some of them I was insanely excited to finally get my hands dirty. Once the first install came around I was extremely disappointed. The whole ordeal should of took less then an afternoon and 99% of the work was done before it was even shipped out to Philly and there was still issues with it. With little work to do on our end besides replacing some broken components that I just had to sit around and watch the whole ordeal didn’t carry any magic for me. After this install the disappointment only continued as the length of time between each install became further and further apart. When staff asked the excuse every single time was that they couldn’t afford to ship from Los Angeles to Philly and that they were exploring cheaper avenues of freshening up the space. This was unfortunately a lie as the space was left completely ignored for upwards of 8 whole months without a single new artwork even being talked about let alone installed. The job became very bland and boring quick and the lines for production became increasingly blurred. The daily upkeep of the artworks were pretty much only kept up with by myself, another few coworkers, and sometimes the production manager. With only a few people giving a single crap in the entire venue things started to decline fast and all the while we begged and pleaded for production to become an official position in the venues and a slight pay bump for doing more work. This was completely shut down by the owner over every single attempt as he explained that we were the only venue operating with a “production” crew and that he did not plan to “create new positions”. The irony of the whole situation only continued as we had our hours changed once again getting rid of the dark day and solely relying on a few hours each morning to maintain the show which mostly consistent of cleaning the entire venue and rarely ever actually working on the artwork. This left things ignored for months and the state of all the work we showed were pitiful to say the least. Things just flat out not working and having to be closed for weeks at a time. Things were dirty and unkept and despite feedback from visitors and the team on how the show was greatly declining in its quality these problems were ignored for months. With yet another 8 month gap and months more of delays the final install I was able to be a part of was installed just last month and throughout the entire process I smelled the desperation and laziness surrounding the entire ordeal. We got rid of our very popular vr film due to the cost of up keeping our 7 year old headsets and the cost of staffing the piece. This was replaced by an insanely silly artwork that was interactive yet fell completely flat on its concept and left much more to be desired from everyone I attempted to play it up to while working. On top of this there was multiple racial slurs that were unfiltered that would show up on the artwork and caused a great rift between staff and management as they struggled to “fix” it while simultaneously having no say in the matter since the owner was in control of everything single aspect of their jobs. The piece was closed for weeks and upon reopening many of us discovered that it wasn’t fixed at all and found a multitude of disgusting racial remarks and other foul things in the transcript for the artwork. I wanted to be proud of my work that I to be fair absolutely carried throughout the process of installing, but with the overall ethics and morals of the company completely thrown out the window I completely disconnected myself and lived out to the very end not caring for a single second about the job I once loved.
Just a few days ago I was told that I would need to be bartender at least 1 day a week in order to keep the shows running. I’ve had previous discourse about doing the bar at all because it drops the base pay rate down nearly 4 dollars at the promise of tips. The funny story about these tips is that they’re split directly down the middle between shifts and if you do not make your usual guide rate the company does not match up your tips despite being expected to cover areas outside of the bar during your shift as well. Unless you were working a Saturday you were essentially hanging out at an empty bar staring at the wall making less money. When this information was presented to be I was very against the idea but never found myself fully answering the question but rather hoping my voice would speak volumes to the owner for all the work I’ve done exceptionally well in all other aspects of the job. Very frustrated I worked the rest of my shift and figured I’d sleep on it and hope by the next day they would’ve changed their mind and I hoped I wouldn’t be forced to do something I flat out never signed up for. Came in the next day and worked a few hours in a mostly empty venue and was pulled into the office. It was then I was told that I would have to part ways with the company. This came as a complete shock as I was just told the information about the bar less then 24 hours before hand and was never informed verbally by a single person that I was going to be fired by saying anything other then “yes sir”. Apparently I said It was a deal breaker in my fit of annoyance and that was grounds enough to say goodbye to all the work that I had put into the company. I even Offered to go hop on the bar at that very moment and that I was never aware that my job was on the line but I was the decision was final. When I asked the owner “why me?” Out of all the people in the venue when even my manager sitting next to me could vouch that I did my job way above what was expected he only replied with “well I think we would disagree on that matter”. At that moment all respect and professionalism went out the window and I knew that that place didn’t deserve another drop of my sweat.
