My first after college job had its good parts and it’s bad parts. I got it shortly before the 2008 housing crash and to this day I was lucky I didn’t lose my job in that market. Even better, I was paid overtime, and they didn’t really limit it. At the peak I earned roughly 50% more off it. It took years to find a new job that paid as well, a story which would be familiar to this sub. I wasn’t in a position to just quit and the alternative was continuing to work in retail with a bachelors.

This company sold a service. This service was generally seen as immoral by everyone, including it’s customers who relied on it. If I told you what the service was you would agree with me. Let’s use a less disliked service full of moral management, in comparison, and say that they sold Cable TV.

This company had more than one owner. They were generally nice people in person. My coworkers were everyday people just looking to make a living.

This company did very well selling “Cable TV”. To their credit they paid their phone reps over market rate, though turnover was high due to the nature of the work. They were always able to fill openings because they knew pay mattered.

Then the government got in the proverbial face of the business . They shut down businessess selling this service through their actions. Someone else in the industry has a documentary related to their actions selling this product and the result to them and their family.

But that’s not the end of the story. The government actions were successful and the business I worked through went through a series of increasingly sketchy partners to keep doing business and the business failed a few months after I left it.

The result is the owners were sued by several business creditors and put under personal bankruptcy by the courts.

It turned out one of the owners hid assets from the courts. Or tried to.

They were sentenced to prison. They once lived in a $3 million home and ended up in the local detention center during Covid.

As a bonus, I looked up their home and the photos show the local sports team mascot posing in every room. More absurd than anything. Not sure it’s their photos but it showed how out of touch they were if so.

To this day what I learned working there gives me sympathy for what people who don't have money to get from payday to payday goes through. It gave me more empathy than the owners of the company in the end.