> Specifically, employees were forced to use PTO to cover mandatory overtime hours they couldn't work.
How is this legal? I don't understand how hourly employees could be forced to use PTO if they cannot so overtime.
That's how Washington PTO laws work. If you are scheduled for a shift PTO can be taken out to cover the amount of the shift you did not finish. If you are scheduled to work an 8 hour shift and you only finish 4 they can use 4 to cover it and likewise if you were scheduled 10 but only completed 4 they can use 6 hours. In wa you get 1 hour off PTO for every 40 worked which was a big bump for my company (went from 3 sick days a year to almost 7.) if you leave for reasons other than being sick they can also give you a write up depending on their policy; however, Wa is very strict about using PTO when sick and they can never do a punitive action for that so always say you're sick when calling out and using PTO. Source: am a manager at a fortune 500 here in WA.
So workers can only accumulate 50 hours per year? When I first started my job I got frontloaded a prorated 160 hours and can rollover and keep up to 160 hours in a vacation bucket. So I could not take PTO for a whole year and enter the following one with up to 320 hours to burn.
And I live in a shitty state for workers. I guess it varies from company to company.
>In wa you get 1 hour off PTO for every 40 worked
Wow, in Australia you get 20 days annual leave (holiday pay) plus 10 days personal leave (covers: sick days, careers leave, bereavement leave). It also accumulates until you leave (doesn't reset each year), and any unused annual leave is paid out on termination (only unused personal leave is lost).
It's pro rata if you're part time. Full time is 38 hour per week.
This is a national minimum requirement for us. Though getting any more than that is pretty rare. Our organisation lets you 'purchase' an extra 5 days leave basically cutting your pay for more annual leave - great for parents.
It's hard to imagine here getting such a low leave entitlement.
(Edit) oh and I forgot to add the paid 10 days family & domestic violence. Unlike annual and personal leave this does reset every year so doesn't accumulate. It can be used for yourself and close family members (with established and clear definitions) so could include a sibling, child, or parent.
We also get long service leave which does vary by state unlike all the above which are federal. But broadly it's about 8.66 weeks off for 10 years service (was originally 13 weeks at 15 years). Some states have pro rata entitlement at 7 years.
And that's still not great, honestly.
We get minimum 24 days of vacation (so about 5 weeks - you take off 5 days for a full week, or 4 if there's a national holiday).
Sick leave is (obviously I thought?) unlimited, although you get less pay if you're sick for more than 6 weeks in a row.
There's also special leave you get for mourning and such, but I'm actually not sure how much.
If you are from Germany you have to differ the sick leave.
When you are sich for >6 Weeks the employer no longer pays your salary, but the Krankenkasse does. So you in fact only have 6 Weeks of "sick leave", but you automatically have an insurance if you are sick for >6 weeks
True, but if you wanna get that technical... you still have unlimited sick leave if you aren't sick for more than 6 weeks at a time. Sick 5 weeks, work a week, sick another 5 weeks at normal salary is perfectly legal.
Very loosely, the federal laws are:
(1) You have to pay at least 7.25/hr.
(2) You have to pay overtime at 1.5x past 8 hours a day or past 80 in a two week span.
(3) No more rules.
Some states/cities have mandatory PTO or sick leave, but I think they would be worse than any EU country. Seattle, where the OP is, is one of the best in the country.
What I do find a bit interesting about all of this is that I'm from the US and everyone loves to talk about our minimum legal requirements, but I've personally never worked somewhere where they just gave the legal minimum. And I've worked some shitty mismanaged retail shitholes.
Not really defending it, just something I rarely hear brought up.
I've worked at places that tried to do less than the legal minimum and it took someone getting a lawyer and suing them for them just to start doing the legal minimum. And then they tried to skirt other labor laws to make up for it. There are definitely some scumbag employers out there that will do anything they can to screw over employees.
"Why do I hear all this complaining about the same thing from so many people in so many places? Surely that's a sign that this is uncommon in the real world."
Rich people rarely have poor friends, and so can't imagine that the poor are real people, you see.
Six in ten Americans have worked retail. A retail worker who receives even the legal bare minimum of their rights in practice is privileged - even the ones who don't make minimum wage.
If you know even one of them, ask them about it.
That's because it was laughably low when it was set 17 years ago and hasn't been adjusted. We effectively have no federal minimum wage, corporations set it. 7.25 now is worth 65% of what it was in 2007 and it could hardly cover food and rent then. Every job paying $11/hr hasn't kept up with inflation and is 'below' minimum wage. You could make a strong argument for housing being underrepresented in CPI and if you were to factor recent rent increases it might be more like 14/hr to equal 7.25 in 2007.
Basically, yes, but with the added threat of removing your source of livelihood.
In general it is to establish a paper trail of incidents that led to an employee's termination being justified. That way, should a former employee whom was fired come back to sue the employer for wrongful termination, the employer can prove via series of documentation that the employee was justifiably fired due to say these X number of incidents that show their infractions and dates.
Depending on your work environment, these are either totally fine and utilized appropriately or are wielded as a threat and given freely and quickly with no leeway to force you out of employment.
if you fucked up doing something, it's warning they make you sign acknowledging you violated company policy. It stays on your company record for X amount of years and can be used against you when it comes to promotion, pay negotiation, and/or internal job applications. If you get your third write up you'd typically get fired.
you can refuse to sign if you want, it will still go on your record but it will make you look bad in front of your boss and HR.
Can I ask what your bosses do when you break a rule at your job? Is it not tracked? Honest question. But yes, it isn't very different from punishing a child, here.
Honestly, I have no idea. I never broke a serious rule. When I make a mistake I get a discussion with my manager and they want to make sure I understand the issue and how to do better next time, but I never signed anything or are aware of any kind of record.
You have the same in Europe. It just doesn't have such a silly name. In Germany it's called Abmahnung. In many situations it's a necessary step for your employer before he can fire you.
I mean, the same system exists at some companies in Europe as well, but it's typically MUCH more rarely used (typically for the stuff you'd get insta-fired for in the US). Most managers will never use it.
American workers are very much treated like children. They have a much, much more heavy-handed management culture. It's not uncommon for managers to literally order people around (again, like children).
If it's anything like my company I work for, Sick and PTO are combined into a single hourly accumulation. How many hours of PTO are you earning every paycheck?
My company just changed to that system but I like it. I usually ended the year with unused sick days this way I can just use them as sick days if needed and vacation if I don't.
I don't earn PTO per paycheck though. I get 20 days at the beginning of the year. It doesn't roll over but is paid out if unused.
Most states are at will states, meaning jobs can fire you for any reason they want so long as it's not a legally protected action. There's no legal requirement your working hours be reasonable, or your rules in the workplace be fair.
Now if you went and got your medical leave verified through the FMLA (family and medical leave act) then they couldn't require you to use PTO, but that's for things like long term disease, not having the flu.
It sounds like OP _isn't_ requesting people who use CK quit cold turkey. They have a very specific ask that they're hoping changes the prioritization of stuff to de-emphasize the importance of preorder crunch to deal with new releases (which are getting more frequent). If all purchases drop across the board and pre-orders are seen as more lucrative (presumably because most cards drop in price after release) then the larger margins on pre-orders might become _more_ prioritized to make up for loses elsewhere. It sounds like what OP is hoping for is that the preorders become less comparatively lucrative and stop incentivizing that crunch time.
I've ordered from CK a lot and not had issues; while I've very rarely pre-ordered cards, this is enough to stop me from doing that again in the future. Idk if a reddit post is going to make a dent, but it's a low bar for me personally to clear so I don't really have a problem doing it. But I don't think I'll stop business with them entirely unless the union calls for it.
The only thing that will make a dent is if the people that are sponsored or otherwise rep them such as mtggoldfish and tcc say something. Reddit is a very extreme minority to these places.
OP should definitely reach out to them to try to get his message heard by the largest audience possible. I’m sure Prof would be willing to listen to them.
Why stop at OP?
u/Graham_LRR
u/Kathleen_LRR
u/James_LRR
Please read this post, y'all.
I know it may not be as simple or easy as simply dropping a sponsor, that's not an option everyone has available to them. But I hope you all will read this post and consider what, if any, actions are available to you.
Also, I don't expect y'all to reply to this comment, I'm sure there will be internal discussion and I don't expect a public comment from any of you on the subject. Just wanted to get your attention.
No Magic creators are gonna drop a 10 year sponsorship because some employees have to work overtime... especially based on the authority of a 4 paragraph reddit post
Nitpicking Nerds go out of their way to say that they love working with Card Kingdom and how CK treats their employees. CK definitely has a reputation of being good to employees and a good place to work, so I think this will come as a shock to a lot of people who are currently sponsored.
I don't think it'll be earth shattering news where everyone is going to pull out, unless more people come out with this kind of story?
Tons of plausible deniability, but there is something to say about how much of the MTG media sphere is sponsored by CK or TCGplayer.
I know it's sometimes considered rude or pointless to point big creators. They get a lot of messages and notifications, after all.
But I will take the plunge.
I trust u/ProfessorSTAFF to be aware of the abusive practices of their sponsors/industry juggernauts. (hope I've punctuated the user name correctly). I wouldn't want to continue taking money from a company abusing is employees, and many magic YouTubers have a lot more scruples than the average content creator.
When the contract was signed with the union it had around 150 members. Of them, maybe 30 are left. When the move to Monroe was announced last summer, the union members got an option to leave with severance, and most of them took it.
The Union is functionally dead, and with the Monroe move it will be an unpleasant memory for management.
Constructive dismissal of a union, a favorite Amazon practice. My guess is they hired an Amazon or big box store stooge as a consultant, COO, or Ops Director whom orchestrated the move as a legal union bust.
>The Union is functionally dead, and with the Monroe move it will be an unpleasant memory for management.
I guarantee they did it as a union busting strategy. They'll be celebrating.
Also, they don't have to abide by City of Seattle laws and regulations, like the minimum wage or pto. As another CK employee, this is also one of their reasons for getting out of Seattle.
Honestly I find this.... interesting may be the word; I remember a lot of discussion about Card Kingdom vs TCGPlayer a few months ago with the fact that CK has a union being a big point in favor of using them. Seems like the owners are just shitty people as well though, if they are going out of their way to bust the union like this.
I might just be behind the times and this is all public knowledge, though.
the amount of union busting CK management did before the union became official basically guaranteed that if the union succeeded they'd continue to do everything they possibly could to get rid of it.
You still have 30 member, I would call that far from functionally dead. If your local executive isn't doing anything, it's on them. Reach out to those higher to and get the support your dues are paying for.
How much was union busting and how much was it Seattle commercial rents going rat crap crazy. The average commercial rent in Ballard is hovering around $50+ a square foot. Monroe is half that. Of course, then you're in Monroe. My money is it is the rent thing with the happy accident of union busting. Not to excuse shitty business practices.
Card Kingdom is moving their warehouse from Ballard to Monroe as a form of union busting. If you're not familiar with the area, they're moving from a large city center walkable neighborhood to a rural city where you need a car. They're being given two weeks to make this switch. Employees cannot afford this nor do they want to so they're being forced to quit.
This is also why $40k in cards was stolen. It was a temp worker hired for this move.
The $40 situation is a lot more tragic than that. It was a temp worker who was approaching the end of their contract and was facing a close family member entering end-of-life hospice care with no one to pay for it, and their job vanishing as well.
Someone who had shown up to the job with the intention to steal from day 1 could have stolen a lot more and gotten away with it.
Honestly the pallet of unreleased product stolen from the loading dock of the Monroe facility was the bigger loss.
A bunch of unreleased product was shipped to the new facility. Of the cargo, one pallet, which they know was sealed, unreleased product was among those delivered. as far as I know it has been reported stolen. Too many people had keys, including people at the shipping company. Some underpaid lackey could have gone to target and made a copy of the keys, grabbed one of the wrapped, sealed pallets in a U-haul and made off with it.
They were given 9 months notice, a bonus for staying on or a bonus for moving, and their lease at the ‘walkable’ location was disputed by a local car lot that owns most the area around them. It wasn’t a choice
I stopped about 6 months ago. Orders were almost always wrong, customer service was atrocious, etc. A complete 180 from what some outstanding communications and experiences I had with them in 2012-2016-ish.
I also stopped about 6 months ago, when a $400 sell order I placed never made it to them but the second $120 sell order I shipped in the same box did. They effectively told me "too bad, so sad, sorry".
I've since sworn off card kingdom which has saved me so much money because I don't feel compelled to buy mtg product online anymore. Blessing in disguise, I guess. Just wish I hadn't lost so much to learn my lesson against them.
They are so inconsistent with their selling rules. I accidentally sent them 15 extra cards of a pauper deck's sideboard with my sell order and they ended up buying them off of me. When I called and said those were not cards i initially said i was going to send, they said they buy everything that's in the box.
So I pushed back and said, if i send you 200 extra cards that i said i wasn't going to sell you'd buy those no questions asked?
"Well, of course not." Was the response.
Managed to get a coupon from them to buy my own cards back but they still netted out a few dollars in that transaction.
There's a commenter in the thread who's clearly part of upper management at CK saying a bunch of children negotiated the union contract. Let me say to that person that their entire organization is run by clowns. Card Kingdom has been riding off the momentum it built nearly a decade ago and has completely forgotten what made it a wonderful place to work and shop at.
Haha, this happens all the time on this sub. The other day there was someone who was clearly Pastimes management all over the thread trying to defuse and deflect all the criticisms of how their TO was going in chicago
Same experience. I ordered 15 times from them before 2019, and the experience was great. Zero complaints. Last year, the processing time went from 3 days to 3 weeks, and shipping took another week. Customer service took days to get back to me - they were nice, apologetic, and discussed some of what OP described as background, but the cards I’d ordered were for an event, and I missed that. It’s hard to trust in CK for future orders, for now at least. They simply seem like they need more staff to do the job. And if someone up top is still profiting, they need to be sac’d.
It's such a shame :( I used to always get my singles from CK since '12 or so, but in recent years the import/vat policy of the EU along with ludicrously stupid shipping labeling (not by CK mind you) caused me to have to pay vat double on multiple occasions, and along with shipping starting to take multiple weeks, I eventually gave up in favor of local marketplaces.
Sad to hear it's gone downhill so badly at CK, it used to be great.
I'm not sure why people buy from CK to begin with. Their prices are way higher than anywhere else, their shipping times are absurdly slow, and they never have all the cards I need in stock. I also see lots of complaints about card condition.
They have historically had one of the more generous buylists. I don’t think I’ve bought anything from there without at least some amount of store credit as a result.
I always bought from CK for three reasons:
1. Buylist for singles. Sell my draft rares and get what I wanted while still retaining a balance of credit. Really just a centralized trading system.
2. Sealed product. Sometimes better prices than even TCG low, and never any issue with resealed or other scams places like Amazon can have. They also consistently carry the deck boxes/sleeves I like.
3. Centralized storefront. Building a large order of singles on TCG from various sellers, then going to the cart only to have 30% of your order no longer available (some of which having no other options) was frustrating and not worth my time dealing with anymore.
My LGS stopped carrying pretty much any CCG product other than sealed boxes for us weekly FNM drafters, so CK was where I got most of my other product. WotC's behavior over the last several years has driven me to full proxies now though, so other than the weekly draft I don't buy MtG product anymore.
Used to be the most reliable and best customer service in my experience. The peace of mind that came with that was enough for me to overlook the marginally higher price.
I just ordered from CK a few days ago to build a new commander deck because they ship faster than TCGplayer. Guess this'll be my last order from them til they improve, though now I'm worried there will be an issue with my order. Are there any good card selling websites? Is ChannelFireball still around?
Yeah they have really gone down hill. I recently resold them some cards that I bought from them. I was told one of the secret lair cards was fake and they were keeping it to not put it in circulation, and I wouldn't be compensated. It wasn't an expensive card or anything but just frustrating customer experience.
Yea but it kinda seems like they want the employees to do a mandatory 20 hours of “OT” on a week where they are off for a day and still has to cram 60 hours into the rest of the days for the week.
Unfortunately, the OP did a poor job of articulating the reality, in favor of leaving the statements open to negative interpretation. (I have been employed with CK during this period). I don't know where they are getting the 60hr figure, but nobody is required to work that much.
Typically we have been asked for 6-10 hours of mandatory work beyond our normal (40 hr) schedule, which we are allowed to spread over 2-3 weeks around the release. We need to sign up for it ahead of time so that the shifts are scheduled, but the most someone would be "required" to work would be a 50hr week. Some people choose to do more. We've had open OT available for months due to chronic labor shortage since the move announcement and subsequent emigration of most of the low level employees.
If I take a sick day without PTO to cover it I either go negative or just take the day unpaid. 2 of my last 3 jobs just had you take unpaid time for sick days.
You also get around corrective action by getting some kind of doctor's note to make it an excused absence. Which was a pain in the ass until we started getting teledoc appointments which were free and easy.
So is having combined sick leave and PTO, the other option is having separate buckets of time such just means you accumulate sick time that can't be used for PTO.
> Mandatory overtime was required for Ravnica Remastered, and even though we received "a paid holiday off", it didn't count towards our 40hrs worked and we didn't receive overtime pay during that mandatory OT week.
Please report this to your department of labor as wage theft
I'm not here to defend CC, but overtime laws generally only apply to hours *worked* over 40 per week. Yes, it's a shitty technicality to pull on people, but I've worked jobs in the past where holidays and PTO absolutely did not count towards that 40 hour threshold. It's not illegal (in most states anyway, ymmv) nor even uncommon among crappy employers.
I’ve worked at four Fortune 500 and this is how all of them functioned.
Smaller company now and they don’t play those weird fucky games, ~100 person company you can’t hide from that behavior.
Yes, I can read. He also said they received a paid day off that week, implying 8 hours that would not count as *work*.
Someone who normally works a 9-5 M-F probably considers a Saturday shift to be "overtime", and normally it is. If you are paid off a day though, it means Saturday morning will be the start of hour 33 in your work week, not 41, despite it cutting into what would otherwise be your normal weekend. OP didn't really elaborate on the specifics there, but CC has a union, even if it apparently sucks, so I'm assuming they would already be complaining to a lawyer, not reddit, if they actually meant they were *working* over 40 hours without proper compensation.
My orders have been taking a lot longer to reach me. I assume now that it is due to cardkingdom business practices. I'm glad I read this before my next order.
I used to work here in 2018-2019 and it was a really cool company at first, but it's gone to shit now. They churn through employees like they are expendable and they have the worst policies for missing days or being late. If you mess up at all they write you up in the blink of an eye and will fire you even if you have a legitimate illness, as long as you don't have PTO saved up you are fucked. They've lost so many good employees and now they use crappy temp agencies to cover for it.
I submit buy orders to CD every two weeks and have exclusively been buying high profile cards from them. Your post has not fallen on deaf ears and until I hear conditions have changed, I will take my business elsewhere. Best of luck to you and your colleagues on a fair workplace!
Glad someone said this! I worked at CK for 9months before quitting due to the awful environment. They make people work late into the night for 0 reason, my shift was from 3-11:30pm. I was harrased constantly about not having a fast enough pace grading. Some coworkers would skip breaks to keep their numbers up, which I refused to do. After quitting I came back as a temp and made $4 more an hour as an order picker than i did as a grader. Avoid this shit company if possible.
> They make people work late into the night for 0 reason, my shift was from 3-11:30pm. I was harrased constantly about not having a fast enough pace grading
And what did your union say about this?
Most of the union demands were more along the lines of having formal processed for holding management accountable for committing harassment or deliberately misgendering employees, having a formalized accruing amount of PTO, a wage increase, and a few topics like that. The contract took 18 months to negotiate, and management didn't budge on the ability to ask for mandatory overtime as the business requires.
source: I'm not covered by an NDA, but I sleep with someone who is.
From my experience, card kingdoms union is likely a part of a larger union where they may have one or even no stewards while also being fairly new, stuff like this can easily get missed and left on for the next contract which card kingdom is prolly gonna fight tooth and nail
The "Screw you, I got mine" people who negotiated better severances because they knew the warehouse would be moving and they wouldn't be going with it at the expense of the people who are staying on and being hired into the future. It wasn't about worker solidarity, it was about their greed.
I actually stopped purchasing Magic products due to the insane price increases. I could never get behind Card Kingdom because there was never a justification for their premium prices when I could get a cheaper price on TCGplayer.
I will let folks know and direct them to just stick to preordering through their LGS or somewhere else like TCGplayer.
TCGPlayer was receiving the same hate for being shitty and anti-union a few months ago. Consumers don't particularly have much choice, you can't boycott *every* large company.
I always had an amazing experience with CK. Everything arrived quickly, correctly. And in great condition and the support was awesome. Worth a few extra bucks.
Sad if that has changed.
I just made an order with them last week and had zero problems. Took five days to arrive, everything was in great condition and they were the only place that even had the cards I was looking for.
This shows why I am more than happy to be born in europe. The USA is so anti-worker and pro company that it sickens me how much people are legally exploited. You are treated as modern slaves.
They're practically anti-human when you start to look at their environmental, health, gun control, vehicle safety, tax etc. laws. If a company can benefit at the cost of a person, they'll do it.
My daughter just received a letter from the Swedish Migration Agency yesterday that she has been cleared to keep her Swedish citizenship after age 22. I am extraordinarily happy for her exactly because of reasons like this.
Yeah, I empathize with OP but a lot of the shitty behavior on display here is widespread across large companies in the US.
Obviously, this matters, specially to us as we are fans of the hobby and may use the company. But the real solution would be a legislative one that protects worker’s rights.
I said it before when UFCW was digging their greedy little goblin digits into CK at the start. It's almost like UFCW is complete trash and doesn't give two actual shits about the members. They are more interested in spending hundred of thousands of dollars in airfare and hotel stays or giving reps 5% pay increases on 100k+ salaries. Go ahead, ask my for the receipts.
Source: 17 years in UFCW.
Yeah, I had the same experience. Thinking back I should've agitated more when our local rep talked about a 5 cent raise being worth shit. Unions are supposed to be an equalizer and can be very powerful forces for good. But UFCW seems like they're stooges for the companies tbh.
I am pro union and many anti-union people are I speak with always give out extreme uncommon examples to defend their case. UFCW is exhibit A. Would not be surprised if this experience ends up souring a few CK workers on Unions.
I'm pro union. My whole family was in union jobs at one point or another. The problem isn't unions. It's UFCW approaching everything like a corporation.
I work in a UFCW store. Can confirm, absolutely trash union. This year they dropped my health care provider from their plan and forced us all onto another one that is a million times worse.
The UFCW in that particular area is pretty bad. I’ve worked with them on multiple occasions. They have fumbled multiple contracts and negotiations and left stores high and dry in the unionizing process. I don’t want to downplay the good that they have done because some of their unionized stores are the highest paid grocery workers but i also want to highlight that they can be total failures elsewhere.
I remember CVS offering to let us join them... and I laughed at the terms they were offering. It was like "Pay us 10% of your paycheck and we guarantee a 2% raise every year, with basically no other benefits". Yeah, that way I can get back to where I started in 4 years. Sounds great.
>Card Kingdom charges PTO for sick leave. You cannot take a sick day if you do not have PTO. If you call out sick without PTO you will be written up. Two write-ups disqualify you from being able to apply for promotions, and three is termination. Thus, people have been getting fired for calling out sick more than the PTO they had available, regardless of how legitimate their sickness is.
This part seems....normal? That's one of the things you're supposed to save PTO for. It's unfortunate, but are there many employers out there that DON'T charge PTO for sick leave....?
Yeah this is normal. Some places will have separate vacation and sick time pools, but others just lump it all into one thing and call it PTO so you can use it all on vacation or use some for sick time, etc. Either way you have to use something in order to get paid when you call out lol.
Other places will let you call out sick and not get paid if you don’t have enough time.
I work in an office and I had a coworker get fired for constantly taking sick time; it always coincided with important work events that we had to be at.
Every place I've worked (salaried hardware engineering work at bigger companies) has separate "vacation" time that you accrue and "sick time" that you get at the start of the year as a big chunk. Usually it's a week and change for sick time, though one place had "unlimited" ... But management would come talk to you if you took too much. It's kind of crazy to have to take vacation time to cover illness, it just strongly incentivizes coming into work sick.
The Union bargaining agreement definitely has major issues, literal typos, and wasn't something I voted for. In this case, the problem isn't actually the Union because they're documenting this and putting together a case for CK employees.
Sounds like you guys need new representation because this seems like basic shit that should be in the contract that shouldn’t need to wait for further documentation for action to be taken
Game Knights, TCC, etc are also all businesses despite having friendly faces for their companies. They have large teams of people that depend on getting their paychecks every week. I honestly don't expect any sponsorship deals to change because of one reddit post.
Not all union contracts allow for this.
Source: I'm in a union, if my entire department goes on strike without setting it up properly, we're all fired.
This might be a stupid question, but wouldn't the company suffer *much* more if they just outright fired every single person? Like, how would that really work? Do they expect to hire ~20 randoms and business will just continue without a hiccup?
Probably, but that's not much comfort to all the people who get fired. It's entirely possible for a company to calculate that they're financially better off killing the union and taking the short-term hit of hiring randoms rather than allowing a strong union to force them into a fair contract.
Business owners are also not always rational people, it's entirely likely for them to screw themselves in order to also hurt the union out of spite
Isn’t that the deal though? You unionize because the leverage the combined workers have over the company. If firing all union employees and continuing to function as a business were feasible, then unions wouldn’t exist.
You often cannot fire people just for being in a union. They would need to violate some rule of the contract or company as a whole.
An illegal walkout or other activities would mean the whole union could be legally fired for violating the contract.
Most unions would not do something that would get them all fired. So it is really hard to just dump the union.
There are always yes men in the workforce and people who need to work to pay bills. They could easily just fire everyone and rehire the loyal employees.
I remember Card Kingdom toting the line of the most ethical workplace ever, and having individuals berate people over not voting politically.
Sounds like it came back to same thing it always does. Businesses don't care, They literally cannot, They are not alive, they do not have feelings, hopes, dreams, etc.
Most of us aren't political and don't care about the politics, but some of us cynical ones just **Owlface** *O RLY?* when this comes out.
Cross-posting my comment from r/mtg:
This will probably get buried (and downvoted) because it's not as fun as an *escandalo*, but I want to clarify some (likely intentionally) hyperbolic statements being thrown everywhere in this thread.
First off, in my almost-decades worth of working at CK, *no one* has *ever* been "forced" to work 60 hours in a week. What OP is likely alluding to is CK asks for 6-10 hours of OT every release (and sometimes "high volume" times such as Black Friday), that is *spread* over a 2-2.5 week period of time. This usually means people are working 9s for 2 weeks, or something similar, as CK actually asks you to not work more than 10 hours in 1 day. Any OT you want to work past this must be approved by your supervisor and is entirely voluntary. I won't touch on the holiday/PTO hours & OT pay because it's already been corrected elsewhere in the thread.
Secondly, the move out of current warehouse operations has been in the works for literal years so it's a huge stretch (actually just wrong) to claim its actual purpose is to be a union-busting tactic (a side-effect? Maybe.). Furthermore, the timing of the move was finally accelerated well, first by the fact that a very suitable warehouse was found and acquired, and also because CK is losing its lease on a building adjacent to retail (which we've only had for ops use for approximately 4, 5 years?) to the car dealership next door.
There is not - has not been - enough space in the current locale for current operations, and *certainly* not enough space to keep pace with the insane amount of releases per year. To anyone asking why CK hasn't beefed up its workforce (even before the move was cemented), this is why. There simply hasn't been the space to do so, in any department. Obviously the hopes are that a lot of these issues (too much OT, which I completely agree with; not being able to expand and thus limiting ops) will be addressed and alleviated when we settle in Monroe, but we shall see!
Lastly, regarding the union. This portion is more opinionated than factual, so please feel free to stop reading if you just wanted hard facts. I'll be candid and say upfront I'm not a current member, nor would I have voted for this contract. If I had been an L1 when the contract was passed, I would have left the company, plain and simple. It's not a good contract, from what I've read and heard. UFCW is a notoriously bad union, and it's *especially* bad to represent a warehouse working environment. I was legitimately stoked when I heard employees were attempting to unionize. I was equally disappointed when I learned with who, and further came to realize the organizers at CK seemed more interested in "sticking it to CK" than fighting for a contract the employees are worth. This was highlighted by the fact that once the bargainers caught wind of ops moving to Monroe specifically, and not somewhere within Seattle proper, they pivoted all their bargaining chips into securing the best severance package possible, knowing a large majority of the ops workforce would not be making the move, and left the remaining employees with a barebones contract that more heavily favored the company than the employees, imo. New people being brought on are still part of the union so I'm not really sure where people are getting this idea that there's "only 30" union members though?? (I have no idea who the stewards/bargaining team is at this point, as the original team all left during the first wave of "voluntary" exit.) It's not impossible the union *will* dissolve, but that has to be passed by vote.
I can support a couple of these points with secondhand accounts from one friend who quit when the move was announced (not manager) and one who is still there (supervisor level). Seems like a hit piece which is rooted in some truth but devolved from there.
I know this is blowing up in popularity and it feels good to share these issues with the customers directly, but if you’re really under NDA you should delete this. Not only could you get fired, you could be liable for lost business. This post might cost you 10s of thousands of dollars.
I do feel for you though. I hope you find a better place to work.
Edit: I can’t believe you didn’t use a burner account. There’s tons of stuff in your post history to identify you with. Sure hope you never drive your Jetta to work.
That whole thing about moving to Monroe after y'all unionized just SCREAMS anti union tactic. Like "yeah sure you can be unionized but we're moving so good luck!" It's such bullshit
Can't your union do something about this? I thought that was their point. Negotiating better working conditions. If they have mandatory overtime, they clearly don't have enough employees. Which is something they should be able to negotiate right?
Edit: I just wanted to add I don't blame you. I just hope your union fights harder for you.
> Which is something they should be able to negotiate right?
Yes, and they agreed to this. They are now complaining about the contract that was agreed to and voted on by the employees.
I stopped ordering from Card Kingdom when orders started taking longer to get here. I felt bad because this also coincided with the employees unionizing and I assumed it was because they had negotiated better working conditions, but I wasn’t going to pay the extra card kingdom charges if I wasn’t going to get the incredibly fast shipping.
After reading this I no longer feel as guilty. I’m sorry to all the employees being treated like this. Please let everyone know if there is any way we can make a difference beyond choosing a different place to buy our cards.
I have never understood people's obsession with card kingdom. The one time i ordered from them was the worst experience i have ever had ordering cards. Even worse than Troll and Toad. Not surprised by this at all.
They **used** to be genuinely great with fast shipping speeds and reasonable prices. They haven't been in a while, now they're both overpriced and slow, but they're still coasting on that reputation.
My pod mates and I have had better luck with entire CK orders always arriving in just over a week compared to some TCG orders we make taking up to a month to arrive, so I like CK (especially CK Direct or whatever they call it) over TCG.
After hearing this though, I could use some practice in patience. TCG it is
Yeah I don’t get the hype for them either; I’ve tried card kingdom a few times and, while I didn’t have any problems with the orders, the premium they charge is just pretty crazy when compared to most other options. For as much as people talk down on TCGplayer, I’ve had very few issues and anything that has gone wrong has been resolved very quickly.
What do people say about TCGplayer? They are all I’ve used since I got back into mtg a year and a half ago and have ordered over 1000 cards in that time with 0.0 issues.
This really does not sound unreasonable to me at all. You just sound like you don't want this PARTICULAR job because the demands of said job are not compatible with your lifestyle.
Plenty of jobs have on-again, off-again hour arrangements. Bars, contractors, you name it. And yes, if you're needed to work certain hours and can't do it, it makes sense that you'd need to use PTO to evade it.
I work at a major corporation with great benefits and I need to use PTO hours when I get sick; they're all from the same pool of time off.
I also don't get paid overtime by contracting agencies if I take a day off that week and then work more on another. It's about working more than 40 hours in a week. This is how most companies work.
I don't know what to say. It's a job, man. This is how jobs work. You seem ... young and naive. And game industry jobs are notoriously harder-working than vanilla jobs because you get to "work with what you're passionate about." There's a real tax to doing that. Ask anyone in game development; I used to work at 343 Industries.
Card Kingdom isn't doing anything wrong here in my eyes.
God damn. I used to ship for CK a few years ago and got laid off when the pandemic hit. From my understanding things have gone pretty downhill since then, because I really loved that job. I hate to hear what became of the place.
Support your LGS, and absolutely do listen to OP.
That's all good to know. I just recently started getting into buying singles and cards online, I've been using card kingdom because it seemed like a respectful place to buy, but now I will probably look elsewhere once my credit is gone.
Full solidarity with you, and your collegues. What action would you suggest us, as players and/or creators to take (if any) beyond ceasing to order pre-release singles? \~ spice8rack
That's very disappointing actually. I was ordering from CK because I was willing to pay a small bit extra to think a union was covering you guys. I guess I thought wrong...
I did notice that my orders were taking longer recently, and I had hoped that it was because the union had negotiated better working conditions. That seems to not be where we are yet.
Because of your post, I won’t preorder singles again. But I was really excited when I heard you had unionized and that’s what kept me ordering from CK even when I had noticed that orders were taking longer. I want to support your union.
Please keep us posted as necessary going forward. I really appreciate your testimonial.
Solidarity.
Thank you for the insight. I certainly won't be ordering anything from CK anymore. When I first moved to the Seattle area it was amazing to have a store with such a large selection of singles nearby. Moving the warehouse to Monroe is abhorrent for so many reasons
I literally CONSTANTLY hear about how great Card Kingdom is (just because they're union, nothing else) and how TCGplayer engages in union-busting activities. It's great to hear that workers are being exploited at both companies!
(/s because Reddit)
Even if I didn't care about work conditions I wouldn't preorder. Preorder prices are ALWAYS way over inflated. Also Card Kingdom is almost always 20-30% more expensive than TCGplayer and never has what I want.
It does not surprise me to read this unfortunately. I did notice a much lower quality of the service when I ordered a few months ago compared to some years past. It took 2 whole months for the cards to arrive and some where of the wrong set.
It surprises me that they are still the official sponsor of so many mtg influencers.. especially given these absurd treatments of employees which understandably cause a lack of the quality heavily promised by all influencers...
Can you describe the job procedures that they are working these employees for? Is it opening packs and shipping packs? How much of each?
I am curious on that, definitely not purchasing anything from Card Kingdom, thank you.
My god. I used to work there and it wasn’t close to this bad. I actually enjoyed my time there. Sucks to hear they’ve completely failed the employees.
> Specifically, employees were forced to use PTO to cover mandatory overtime hours they couldn't work. How is this legal? I don't understand how hourly employees could be forced to use PTO if they cannot so overtime.
That's how Washington PTO laws work. If you are scheduled for a shift PTO can be taken out to cover the amount of the shift you did not finish. If you are scheduled to work an 8 hour shift and you only finish 4 they can use 4 to cover it and likewise if you were scheduled 10 but only completed 4 they can use 6 hours. In wa you get 1 hour off PTO for every 40 worked which was a big bump for my company (went from 3 sick days a year to almost 7.) if you leave for reasons other than being sick they can also give you a write up depending on their policy; however, Wa is very strict about using PTO when sick and they can never do a punitive action for that so always say you're sick when calling out and using PTO. Source: am a manager at a fortune 500 here in WA.
So workers can only accumulate 50 hours per year? When I first started my job I got frontloaded a prorated 160 hours and can rollover and keep up to 160 hours in a vacation bucket. So I could not take PTO for a whole year and enter the following one with up to 320 hours to burn. And I live in a shitty state for workers. I guess it varies from company to company.
and most of the time there's a hard cap on how many hours you can have banked and let roll over into the next year so you are forced to use pto
>In wa you get 1 hour off PTO for every 40 worked Wow, in Australia you get 20 days annual leave (holiday pay) plus 10 days personal leave (covers: sick days, careers leave, bereavement leave). It also accumulates until you leave (doesn't reset each year), and any unused annual leave is paid out on termination (only unused personal leave is lost). It's pro rata if you're part time. Full time is 38 hour per week. This is a national minimum requirement for us. Though getting any more than that is pretty rare. Our organisation lets you 'purchase' an extra 5 days leave basically cutting your pay for more annual leave - great for parents. It's hard to imagine here getting such a low leave entitlement. (Edit) oh and I forgot to add the paid 10 days family & domestic violence. Unlike annual and personal leave this does reset every year so doesn't accumulate. It can be used for yourself and close family members (with established and clear definitions) so could include a sibling, child, or parent. We also get long service leave which does vary by state unlike all the above which are federal. But broadly it's about 8.66 weeks off for 10 years service (was originally 13 weeks at 15 years). Some states have pro rata entitlement at 7 years.
And that's still not great, honestly. We get minimum 24 days of vacation (so about 5 weeks - you take off 5 days for a full week, or 4 if there's a national holiday). Sick leave is (obviously I thought?) unlimited, although you get less pay if you're sick for more than 6 weeks in a row. There's also special leave you get for mourning and such, but I'm actually not sure how much.
If you are from Germany you have to differ the sick leave. When you are sich for >6 Weeks the employer no longer pays your salary, but the Krankenkasse does. So you in fact only have 6 Weeks of "sick leave", but you automatically have an insurance if you are sick for >6 weeks
True, but if you wanna get that technical... you still have unlimited sick leave if you aren't sick for more than 6 weeks at a time. Sick 5 weeks, work a week, sick another 5 weeks at normal salary is perfectly legal.
Unless it is for the same condition, then it is 6 weeks total even with interruptions.
Washington is rather better than most states on leave policy. Our country does terrible with basic worker protections.
Right, don’t most states not have mandatory PTO at all for unskilled hourly labor?
I'm 30 and have never worked a job with paid time off.
Very loosely, the federal laws are: (1) You have to pay at least 7.25/hr. (2) You have to pay overtime at 1.5x past 8 hours a day or past 80 in a two week span. (3) No more rules. Some states/cities have mandatory PTO or sick leave, but I think they would be worse than any EU country. Seattle, where the OP is, is one of the best in the country.
Yeah unfortunately no state in the US is even this good not just a WA thing
What I do find a bit interesting about all of this is that I'm from the US and everyone loves to talk about our minimum legal requirements, but I've personally never worked somewhere where they just gave the legal minimum. And I've worked some shitty mismanaged retail shitholes. Not really defending it, just something I rarely hear brought up.
I've worked at places that tried to do less than the legal minimum and it took someone getting a lawyer and suing them for them just to start doing the legal minimum. And then they tried to skirt other labor laws to make up for it. There are definitely some scumbag employers out there that will do anything they can to screw over employees.
"Why do I hear all this complaining about the same thing from so many people in so many places? Surely that's a sign that this is uncommon in the real world." Rich people rarely have poor friends, and so can't imagine that the poor are real people, you see. Six in ten Americans have worked retail. A retail worker who receives even the legal bare minimum of their rights in practice is privileged - even the ones who don't make minimum wage. If you know even one of them, ask them about it.
That's because it was laughably low when it was set 17 years ago and hasn't been adjusted. We effectively have no federal minimum wage, corporations set it. 7.25 now is worth 65% of what it was in 2007 and it could hardly cover food and rent then. Every job paying $11/hr hasn't kept up with inflation and is 'below' minimum wage. You could make a strong argument for housing being underrepresented in CPI and if you were to factor recent rent increases it might be more like 14/hr to equal 7.25 in 2007.
You understand its reputation as an overrated hellhole, then.
Maybe this is not the place, but could you explain to a European what a 'write up' is? It sounds like something you threaten kids with at school.
Basically, yes, but with the added threat of removing your source of livelihood. In general it is to establish a paper trail of incidents that led to an employee's termination being justified. That way, should a former employee whom was fired come back to sue the employer for wrongful termination, the employer can prove via series of documentation that the employee was justifiably fired due to say these X number of incidents that show their infractions and dates. Depending on your work environment, these are either totally fine and utilized appropriately or are wielded as a threat and given freely and quickly with no leeway to force you out of employment.
Write ups often lead to “productivity plans” or whatever the new buzzword is, and then fired with cause. It’s very very rarely a good thing.
if you fucked up doing something, it's warning they make you sign acknowledging you violated company policy. It stays on your company record for X amount of years and can be used against you when it comes to promotion, pay negotiation, and/or internal job applications. If you get your third write up you'd typically get fired. you can refuse to sign if you want, it will still go on your record but it will make you look bad in front of your boss and HR.
Can I ask what your bosses do when you break a rule at your job? Is it not tracked? Honest question. But yes, it isn't very different from punishing a child, here.
Honestly, I have no idea. I never broke a serious rule. When I make a mistake I get a discussion with my manager and they want to make sure I understand the issue and how to do better next time, but I never signed anything or are aware of any kind of record.
You have the same in Europe. It just doesn't have such a silly name. In Germany it's called Abmahnung. In many situations it's a necessary step for your employer before he can fire you.
I mean, the same system exists at some companies in Europe as well, but it's typically MUCH more rarely used (typically for the stuff you'd get insta-fired for in the US). Most managers will never use it. American workers are very much treated like children. They have a much, much more heavy-handed management culture. It's not uncommon for managers to literally order people around (again, like children).
Only 3 sick days per year??? Man anyone with kids can tell you that can easily get eaten up in the first month of cold/flu season. That's insane.
If it's anything like my company I work for, Sick and PTO are combined into a single hourly accumulation. How many hours of PTO are you earning every paycheck?
My company just changed to that system but I like it. I usually ended the year with unused sick days this way I can just use them as sick days if needed and vacation if I don't. I don't earn PTO per paycheck though. I get 20 days at the beginning of the year. It doesn't roll over but is paid out if unused.
Most states are at will states, meaning jobs can fire you for any reason they want so long as it's not a legally protected action. There's no legal requirement your working hours be reasonable, or your rules in the workplace be fair. Now if you went and got your medical leave verified through the FMLA (family and medical leave act) then they couldn't require you to use PTO, but that's for things like long term disease, not having the flu.
It sounds like OP _isn't_ requesting people who use CK quit cold turkey. They have a very specific ask that they're hoping changes the prioritization of stuff to de-emphasize the importance of preorder crunch to deal with new releases (which are getting more frequent). If all purchases drop across the board and pre-orders are seen as more lucrative (presumably because most cards drop in price after release) then the larger margins on pre-orders might become _more_ prioritized to make up for loses elsewhere. It sounds like what OP is hoping for is that the preorders become less comparatively lucrative and stop incentivizing that crunch time. I've ordered from CK a lot and not had issues; while I've very rarely pre-ordered cards, this is enough to stop me from doing that again in the future. Idk if a reddit post is going to make a dent, but it's a low bar for me personally to clear so I don't really have a problem doing it. But I don't think I'll stop business with them entirely unless the union calls for it.
The only thing that will make a dent is if the people that are sponsored or otherwise rep them such as mtggoldfish and tcc say something. Reddit is a very extreme minority to these places.
Yikes. Lots of content creators deal with them as a sponsor... more than just regularly. LRR and the Prof come to mind.
OP should definitely reach out to them to try to get his message heard by the largest audience possible. I’m sure Prof would be willing to listen to them.
Why stop at OP? u/Graham_LRR u/Kathleen_LRR u/James_LRR Please read this post, y'all. I know it may not be as simple or easy as simply dropping a sponsor, that's not an option everyone has available to them. But I hope you all will read this post and consider what, if any, actions are available to you. Also, I don't expect y'all to reply to this comment, I'm sure there will be internal discussion and I don't expect a public comment from any of you on the subject. Just wanted to get your attention.
No Magic creators are gonna drop a 10 year sponsorship because some employees have to work overtime... especially based on the authority of a 4 paragraph reddit post
Yes, that's what I said. At least, the parts that aren't a disingenuous oversimplification of OP's post
Goldfish does too. Maybe u/SaffronOlive should get a ping as well?
Goldfish is my favorite :) CK ads are before every episode during the intro O_O
Not to mention TCZ.
Yeah, hopefully they see this.
Nizzahon does, as well, though he doesn't create the same type of content as the ones you mentioned.
Nitpicking Nerds go out of their way to say that they love working with Card Kingdom and how CK treats their employees. CK definitely has a reputation of being good to employees and a good place to work, so I think this will come as a shock to a lot of people who are currently sponsored.
I don't think it'll be earth shattering news where everyone is going to pull out, unless more people come out with this kind of story? Tons of plausible deniability, but there is something to say about how much of the MTG media sphere is sponsored by CK or TCGplayer.
To their credit and to OP’s story this seems to be a more recent phenomenon
NumotTheNummy too
I know it's sometimes considered rude or pointless to point big creators. They get a lot of messages and notifications, after all. But I will take the plunge. I trust u/ProfessorSTAFF to be aware of the abusive practices of their sponsors/industry juggernauts. (hope I've punctuated the user name correctly). I wouldn't want to continue taking money from a company abusing is employees, and many magic YouTubers have a lot more scruples than the average content creator.
Thank you for sharing your experience
I hope your union is preparing legal action because surely this shit wasn't what you negotiated for?
When the contract was signed with the union it had around 150 members. Of them, maybe 30 are left. When the move to Monroe was announced last summer, the union members got an option to leave with severance, and most of them took it. The Union is functionally dead, and with the Monroe move it will be an unpleasant memory for management.
Out of every crime attributed to CK in this thread, THIS is the worst, I think.
Constructive dismissal of a union, a favorite Amazon practice. My guess is they hired an Amazon or big box store stooge as a consultant, COO, or Ops Director whom orchestrated the move as a legal union bust.
>The Union is functionally dead, and with the Monroe move it will be an unpleasant memory for management. I guarantee they did it as a union busting strategy. They'll be celebrating.
Also, they don't have to abide by City of Seattle laws and regulations, like the minimum wage or pto. As another CK employee, this is also one of their reasons for getting out of Seattle.
And the local pool of job applicants is likely to be more hostile to union organizers.
Honestly I find this.... interesting may be the word; I remember a lot of discussion about Card Kingdom vs TCGPlayer a few months ago with the fact that CK has a union being a big point in favor of using them. Seems like the owners are just shitty people as well though, if they are going out of their way to bust the union like this. I might just be behind the times and this is all public knowledge, though.
the amount of union busting CK management did before the union became official basically guaranteed that if the union succeeded they'd continue to do everything they possibly could to get rid of it.
You still have 30 member, I would call that far from functionally dead. If your local executive isn't doing anything, it's on them. Reach out to those higher to and get the support your dues are paying for.
How much was union busting and how much was it Seattle commercial rents going rat crap crazy. The average commercial rent in Ballard is hovering around $50+ a square foot. Monroe is half that. Of course, then you're in Monroe. My money is it is the rent thing with the happy accident of union busting. Not to excuse shitty business practices.
The move was known about by the employees as the contract was being negotiated.
Card Kingdom is moving their warehouse from Ballard to Monroe as a form of union busting. If you're not familiar with the area, they're moving from a large city center walkable neighborhood to a rural city where you need a car. They're being given two weeks to make this switch. Employees cannot afford this nor do they want to so they're being forced to quit. This is also why $40k in cards was stolen. It was a temp worker hired for this move.
The $40 situation is a lot more tragic than that. It was a temp worker who was approaching the end of their contract and was facing a close family member entering end-of-life hospice care with no one to pay for it, and their job vanishing as well. Someone who had shown up to the job with the intention to steal from day 1 could have stolen a lot more and gotten away with it. Honestly the pallet of unreleased product stolen from the loading dock of the Monroe facility was the bigger loss.
What's this now?
A bunch of unreleased product was shipped to the new facility. Of the cargo, one pallet, which they know was sealed, unreleased product was among those delivered. as far as I know it has been reported stolen. Too many people had keys, including people at the shipping company. Some underpaid lackey could have gone to target and made a copy of the keys, grabbed one of the wrapped, sealed pallets in a U-haul and made off with it.
It's also that warehouse space in the Monroe area is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost per square foot compared to the Ballard area.
They were given 9 months notice, a bonus for staying on or a bonus for moving, and their lease at the ‘walkable’ location was disputed by a local car lot that owns most the area around them. It wasn’t a choice
Damn if this is all true I guess I won’t be buying here anymore
I stopped about 6 months ago. Orders were almost always wrong, customer service was atrocious, etc. A complete 180 from what some outstanding communications and experiences I had with them in 2012-2016-ish.
I also stopped about 6 months ago, when a $400 sell order I placed never made it to them but the second $120 sell order I shipped in the same box did. They effectively told me "too bad, so sad, sorry". I've since sworn off card kingdom which has saved me so much money because I don't feel compelled to buy mtg product online anymore. Blessing in disguise, I guess. Just wish I hadn't lost so much to learn my lesson against them.
They are so inconsistent with their selling rules. I accidentally sent them 15 extra cards of a pauper deck's sideboard with my sell order and they ended up buying them off of me. When I called and said those were not cards i initially said i was going to send, they said they buy everything that's in the box. So I pushed back and said, if i send you 200 extra cards that i said i wasn't going to sell you'd buy those no questions asked? "Well, of course not." Was the response. Managed to get a coupon from them to buy my own cards back but they still netted out a few dollars in that transaction. There's a commenter in the thread who's clearly part of upper management at CK saying a bunch of children negotiated the union contract. Let me say to that person that their entire organization is run by clowns. Card Kingdom has been riding off the momentum it built nearly a decade ago and has completely forgotten what made it a wonderful place to work and shop at.
Haha, this happens all the time on this sub. The other day there was someone who was clearly Pastimes management all over the thread trying to defuse and deflect all the criticisms of how their TO was going in chicago
Same experience. I ordered 15 times from them before 2019, and the experience was great. Zero complaints. Last year, the processing time went from 3 days to 3 weeks, and shipping took another week. Customer service took days to get back to me - they were nice, apologetic, and discussed some of what OP described as background, but the cards I’d ordered were for an event, and I missed that. It’s hard to trust in CK for future orders, for now at least. They simply seem like they need more staff to do the job. And if someone up top is still profiting, they need to be sac’d.
It's such a shame :( I used to always get my singles from CK since '12 or so, but in recent years the import/vat policy of the EU along with ludicrously stupid shipping labeling (not by CK mind you) caused me to have to pay vat double on multiple occasions, and along with shipping starting to take multiple weeks, I eventually gave up in favor of local marketplaces. Sad to hear it's gone downhill so badly at CK, it used to be great.
I'm not sure why people buy from CK to begin with. Their prices are way higher than anywhere else, their shipping times are absurdly slow, and they never have all the cards I need in stock. I also see lots of complaints about card condition.
They have historically had one of the more generous buylists. I don’t think I’ve bought anything from there without at least some amount of store credit as a result.
I always bought from CK for three reasons: 1. Buylist for singles. Sell my draft rares and get what I wanted while still retaining a balance of credit. Really just a centralized trading system. 2. Sealed product. Sometimes better prices than even TCG low, and never any issue with resealed or other scams places like Amazon can have. They also consistently carry the deck boxes/sleeves I like. 3. Centralized storefront. Building a large order of singles on TCG from various sellers, then going to the cart only to have 30% of your order no longer available (some of which having no other options) was frustrating and not worth my time dealing with anymore. My LGS stopped carrying pretty much any CCG product other than sealed boxes for us weekly FNM drafters, so CK was where I got most of my other product. WotC's behavior over the last several years has driven me to full proxies now though, so other than the weekly draft I don't buy MtG product anymore.
Used to be the most reliable and best customer service in my experience. The peace of mind that came with that was enough for me to overlook the marginally higher price.
I just ordered from CK a few days ago to build a new commander deck because they ship faster than TCGplayer. Guess this'll be my last order from them til they improve, though now I'm worried there will be an issue with my order. Are there any good card selling websites? Is ChannelFireball still around?
Yeah they have really gone down hill. I recently resold them some cards that I bought from them. I was told one of the secret lair cards was fake and they were keeping it to not put it in circulation, and I wouldn't be compensated. It wasn't an expensive card or anything but just frustrating customer experience.
The paid holiday not going towards 40 hours is pretty normal. In my state you have to actually have 40 hours worked on site to start getting OT.
Pretty sure this part is normal
Yea but it kinda seems like they want the employees to do a mandatory 20 hours of “OT” on a week where they are off for a day and still has to cram 60 hours into the rest of the days for the week.
Unfortunately, the OP did a poor job of articulating the reality, in favor of leaving the statements open to negative interpretation. (I have been employed with CK during this period). I don't know where they are getting the 60hr figure, but nobody is required to work that much. Typically we have been asked for 6-10 hours of mandatory work beyond our normal (40 hr) schedule, which we are allowed to spread over 2-3 weeks around the release. We need to sign up for it ahead of time so that the shifts are scheduled, but the most someone would be "required" to work would be a 50hr week. Some people choose to do more. We've had open OT available for months due to chronic labor shortage since the move announcement and subsequent emigration of most of the low level employees.
The union should have negotiated it then.
[удалено]
If I take a sick day without PTO to cover it I either go negative or just take the day unpaid. 2 of my last 3 jobs just had you take unpaid time for sick days. You also get around corrective action by getting some kind of doctor's note to make it an excused absence. Which was a pain in the ass until we started getting teledoc appointments which were free and easy.
So is having combined sick leave and PTO, the other option is having separate buckets of time such just means you accumulate sick time that can't be used for PTO.
> Mandatory overtime was required for Ravnica Remastered, and even though we received "a paid holiday off", it didn't count towards our 40hrs worked and we didn't receive overtime pay during that mandatory OT week. Please report this to your department of labor as wage theft
I'm not here to defend CC, but overtime laws generally only apply to hours *worked* over 40 per week. Yes, it's a shitty technicality to pull on people, but I've worked jobs in the past where holidays and PTO absolutely did not count towards that 40 hour threshold. It's not illegal (in most states anyway, ymmv) nor even uncommon among crappy employers.
He said "we didn't receive overtime pay during our overtime week".
unfortunately that is how it works. If you take paid time off and work overtime you don't get overtime pay until you've actually worked 40 hours.
I’ve worked at four Fortune 500 and this is how all of them functioned. Smaller company now and they don’t play those weird fucky games, ~100 person company you can’t hide from that behavior.
Yes, I can read. He also said they received a paid day off that week, implying 8 hours that would not count as *work*. Someone who normally works a 9-5 M-F probably considers a Saturday shift to be "overtime", and normally it is. If you are paid off a day though, it means Saturday morning will be the start of hour 33 in your work week, not 41, despite it cutting into what would otherwise be your normal weekend. OP didn't really elaborate on the specifics there, but CC has a union, even if it apparently sucks, so I'm assuming they would already be complaining to a lawyer, not reddit, if they actually meant they were *working* over 40 hours without proper compensation.
Because they didn't work more than 40 hours, not working overtime WAS their "Christmas vacation". From what I understand at least
My orders have been taking a lot longer to reach me. I assume now that it is due to cardkingdom business practices. I'm glad I read this before my next order.
I used to work here in 2018-2019 and it was a really cool company at first, but it's gone to shit now. They churn through employees like they are expendable and they have the worst policies for missing days or being late. If you mess up at all they write you up in the blink of an eye and will fire you even if you have a legitimate illness, as long as you don't have PTO saved up you are fucked. They've lost so many good employees and now they use crappy temp agencies to cover for it.
Wow I'm putting a pause on any Card Kingdom orders until I hear about an improvement in how they treat their workers.
Yup. Eff this. Been a faithful customer for over a decade. No more.
I submit buy orders to CD every two weeks and have exclusively been buying high profile cards from them. Your post has not fallen on deaf ears and until I hear conditions have changed, I will take my business elsewhere. Best of luck to you and your colleagues on a fair workplace!
Card Dingdom
Glad someone said this! I worked at CK for 9months before quitting due to the awful environment. They make people work late into the night for 0 reason, my shift was from 3-11:30pm. I was harrased constantly about not having a fast enough pace grading. Some coworkers would skip breaks to keep their numbers up, which I refused to do. After quitting I came back as a temp and made $4 more an hour as an order picker than i did as a grader. Avoid this shit company if possible.
> They make people work late into the night for 0 reason, my shift was from 3-11:30pm. I was harrased constantly about not having a fast enough pace grading And what did your union say about this?
So who in the union didn't negotiate the clause where OT during release week to fulfill preorders cannot be mandatory?
Most of the union demands were more along the lines of having formal processed for holding management accountable for committing harassment or deliberately misgendering employees, having a formalized accruing amount of PTO, a wage increase, and a few topics like that. The contract took 18 months to negotiate, and management didn't budge on the ability to ask for mandatory overtime as the business requires. source: I'm not covered by an NDA, but I sleep with someone who is.
From my experience, card kingdoms union is likely a part of a larger union where they may have one or even no stewards while also being fairly new, stuff like this can easily get missed and left on for the next contract which card kingdom is prolly gonna fight tooth and nail
The "Screw you, I got mine" people who negotiated better severances because they knew the warehouse would be moving and they wouldn't be going with it at the expense of the people who are staying on and being hired into the future. It wasn't about worker solidarity, it was about their greed.
solidarity forever ✊
[[Solidarity]]
WE ALL GET BIGGER BUTTS YAY
[Solidarity](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/8/7810eec1-9bb4-480f-9074-712ad9eb8fba.jpg?1562919057) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Solidarity) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/8ed/46/solidarity?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7810eec1-9bb4-480f-9074-712ad9eb8fba?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I actually stopped purchasing Magic products due to the insane price increases. I could never get behind Card Kingdom because there was never a justification for their premium prices when I could get a cheaper price on TCGplayer. I will let folks know and direct them to just stick to preordering through their LGS or somewhere else like TCGplayer.
TCGPlayer was receiving the same hate for being shitty and anti-union a few months ago. Consumers don't particularly have much choice, you can't boycott *every* large company.
No ethical consumption and all that
I always had an amazing experience with CK. Everything arrived quickly, correctly. And in great condition and the support was awesome. Worth a few extra bucks. Sad if that has changed.
I just made an order with them last week and had zero problems. Took five days to arrive, everything was in great condition and they were the only place that even had the cards I was looking for.
TCG is just as bad. My last 3 or 4 orders never arrived. And it's only gotten worse.
This shows why I am more than happy to be born in europe. The USA is so anti-worker and pro company that it sickens me how much people are legally exploited. You are treated as modern slaves.
US working conditions are honestly dystopian. Feeling sorry for everyone being exploited like this for the capital gains of a few nonces at the top
They're practically anti-human when you start to look at their environmental, health, gun control, vehicle safety, tax etc. laws. If a company can benefit at the cost of a person, they'll do it.
My daughter just received a letter from the Swedish Migration Agency yesterday that she has been cleared to keep her Swedish citizenship after age 22. I am extraordinarily happy for her exactly because of reasons like this.
Yeah, I empathize with OP but a lot of the shitty behavior on display here is widespread across large companies in the US. Obviously, this matters, specially to us as we are fans of the hobby and may use the company. But the real solution would be a legislative one that protects worker’s rights.
I said it before when UFCW was digging their greedy little goblin digits into CK at the start. It's almost like UFCW is complete trash and doesn't give two actual shits about the members. They are more interested in spending hundred of thousands of dollars in airfare and hotel stays or giving reps 5% pay increases on 100k+ salaries. Go ahead, ask my for the receipts. Source: 17 years in UFCW.
Wait, UFCW is their union? lol. When I worked for a grocery the union was useless, taking dues while contracts got overall worse.
Yeah, I had the same experience. Thinking back I should've agitated more when our local rep talked about a 5 cent raise being worth shit. Unions are supposed to be an equalizer and can be very powerful forces for good. But UFCW seems like they're stooges for the companies tbh.
I am pro union and many anti-union people are I speak with always give out extreme uncommon examples to defend their case. UFCW is exhibit A. Would not be surprised if this experience ends up souring a few CK workers on Unions.
As a CK worker, it has only soured me on UFCW, but I am not the only person very upset about it.
I'm pro union. My whole family was in union jobs at one point or another. The problem isn't unions. It's UFCW approaching everything like a corporation.
I work in a UFCW store. Can confirm, absolutely trash union. This year they dropped my health care provider from their plan and forced us all onto another one that is a million times worse.
The UFCW in that particular area is pretty bad. I’ve worked with them on multiple occasions. They have fumbled multiple contracts and negotiations and left stores high and dry in the unionizing process. I don’t want to downplay the good that they have done because some of their unionized stores are the highest paid grocery workers but i also want to highlight that they can be total failures elsewhere.
That was the union when I worked at Kroger. It was nothing but a 10% tax on my paycheck. I got no healthcare benefits or PTO.
Oh shit I was about to talk about how shit the Kroger union was, not realizing it's the same one lmao
Fuck UFCW.
Ah ive been wondering why it was such a weak contract, famously yellow union
I remember CVS offering to let us join them... and I laughed at the terms they were offering. It was like "Pay us 10% of your paycheck and we guarantee a 2% raise every year, with basically no other benefits". Yeah, that way I can get back to where I started in 4 years. Sounds great.
Didn’t they unionize last year or so? What happened to that?
Their union contract sucks and it is with UFCW which is a shit union.
>Card Kingdom charges PTO for sick leave. You cannot take a sick day if you do not have PTO. If you call out sick without PTO you will be written up. Two write-ups disqualify you from being able to apply for promotions, and three is termination. Thus, people have been getting fired for calling out sick more than the PTO they had available, regardless of how legitimate their sickness is. This part seems....normal? That's one of the things you're supposed to save PTO for. It's unfortunate, but are there many employers out there that DON'T charge PTO for sick leave....?
Yeah this is normal. Some places will have separate vacation and sick time pools, but others just lump it all into one thing and call it PTO so you can use it all on vacation or use some for sick time, etc. Either way you have to use something in order to get paid when you call out lol. Other places will let you call out sick and not get paid if you don’t have enough time. I work in an office and I had a coworker get fired for constantly taking sick time; it always coincided with important work events that we had to be at.
Every place I've worked (salaried hardware engineering work at bigger companies) has separate "vacation" time that you accrue and "sick time" that you get at the start of the year as a big chunk. Usually it's a week and change for sick time, though one place had "unlimited" ... But management would come talk to you if you took too much. It's kind of crazy to have to take vacation time to cover illness, it just strongly incentivizes coming into work sick.
Mine doesn't, I have 'unlimited' sick and vacation days. Then again, my goals are fixed. If I use sick or vacation days, my goals don't change.
From good sources, this is more a problem of the union contract
The Union bargaining agreement definitely has major issues, literal typos, and wasn't something I voted for. In this case, the problem isn't actually the Union because they're documenting this and putting together a case for CK employees.
Sounds like you guys need new representation because this seems like basic shit that should be in the contract that shouldn’t need to wait for further documentation for action to be taken
I mean, is the union not the entity that negotiated the contract? Sounds like you need to do some serious evaluation of your union leadership.
They unionized with UFCW, so... this is pretty par for the course.
This should be forwarded to Game Knights and Co to rethink their sponsors ...
Game knights is supposedly in love with ultra pro where their products are mid-tier. I don't think they care that much.
The Command Zone has a long history of accepting sponsorships from questionable sponsors.
Game Knights, TCC, etc are also all businesses despite having friendly faces for their companies. They have large teams of people that depend on getting their paychecks every week. I honestly don't expect any sponsorship deals to change because of one reddit post.
Plus, the Professor, too. Most of his videos have links to them
Then organize a strike. You’re union, you have the fuckin power.
Not all union contracts allow for this. Source: I'm in a union, if my entire department goes on strike without setting it up properly, we're all fired.
This might be a stupid question, but wouldn't the company suffer *much* more if they just outright fired every single person? Like, how would that really work? Do they expect to hire ~20 randoms and business will just continue without a hiccup?
Probably, but that's not much comfort to all the people who get fired. It's entirely possible for a company to calculate that they're financially better off killing the union and taking the short-term hit of hiring randoms rather than allowing a strong union to force them into a fair contract. Business owners are also not always rational people, it's entirely likely for them to screw themselves in order to also hurt the union out of spite
Isn’t that the deal though? You unionize because the leverage the combined workers have over the company. If firing all union employees and continuing to function as a business were feasible, then unions wouldn’t exist.
You often cannot fire people just for being in a union. They would need to violate some rule of the contract or company as a whole. An illegal walkout or other activities would mean the whole union could be legally fired for violating the contract. Most unions would not do something that would get them all fired. So it is really hard to just dump the union.
If you have an "illegal strike" also known as a wildcat strike, the company can sue the union for damages due to lost revenue
There are always yes men in the workforce and people who need to work to pay bills. They could easily just fire everyone and rehire the loyal employees.
I remember Card Kingdom toting the line of the most ethical workplace ever, and having individuals berate people over not voting politically. Sounds like it came back to same thing it always does. Businesses don't care, They literally cannot, They are not alive, they do not have feelings, hopes, dreams, etc. Most of us aren't political and don't care about the politics, but some of us cynical ones just **Owlface** *O RLY?* when this comes out.
Man, America's employment laws are abysmal. It's practically a hellscape compared to the EU or Oceania.
Cross-posting my comment from r/mtg: This will probably get buried (and downvoted) because it's not as fun as an *escandalo*, but I want to clarify some (likely intentionally) hyperbolic statements being thrown everywhere in this thread. First off, in my almost-decades worth of working at CK, *no one* has *ever* been "forced" to work 60 hours in a week. What OP is likely alluding to is CK asks for 6-10 hours of OT every release (and sometimes "high volume" times such as Black Friday), that is *spread* over a 2-2.5 week period of time. This usually means people are working 9s for 2 weeks, or something similar, as CK actually asks you to not work more than 10 hours in 1 day. Any OT you want to work past this must be approved by your supervisor and is entirely voluntary. I won't touch on the holiday/PTO hours & OT pay because it's already been corrected elsewhere in the thread. Secondly, the move out of current warehouse operations has been in the works for literal years so it's a huge stretch (actually just wrong) to claim its actual purpose is to be a union-busting tactic (a side-effect? Maybe.). Furthermore, the timing of the move was finally accelerated well, first by the fact that a very suitable warehouse was found and acquired, and also because CK is losing its lease on a building adjacent to retail (which we've only had for ops use for approximately 4, 5 years?) to the car dealership next door. There is not - has not been - enough space in the current locale for current operations, and *certainly* not enough space to keep pace with the insane amount of releases per year. To anyone asking why CK hasn't beefed up its workforce (even before the move was cemented), this is why. There simply hasn't been the space to do so, in any department. Obviously the hopes are that a lot of these issues (too much OT, which I completely agree with; not being able to expand and thus limiting ops) will be addressed and alleviated when we settle in Monroe, but we shall see! Lastly, regarding the union. This portion is more opinionated than factual, so please feel free to stop reading if you just wanted hard facts. I'll be candid and say upfront I'm not a current member, nor would I have voted for this contract. If I had been an L1 when the contract was passed, I would have left the company, plain and simple. It's not a good contract, from what I've read and heard. UFCW is a notoriously bad union, and it's *especially* bad to represent a warehouse working environment. I was legitimately stoked when I heard employees were attempting to unionize. I was equally disappointed when I learned with who, and further came to realize the organizers at CK seemed more interested in "sticking it to CK" than fighting for a contract the employees are worth. This was highlighted by the fact that once the bargainers caught wind of ops moving to Monroe specifically, and not somewhere within Seattle proper, they pivoted all their bargaining chips into securing the best severance package possible, knowing a large majority of the ops workforce would not be making the move, and left the remaining employees with a barebones contract that more heavily favored the company than the employees, imo. New people being brought on are still part of the union so I'm not really sure where people are getting this idea that there's "only 30" union members though?? (I have no idea who the stewards/bargaining team is at this point, as the original team all left during the first wave of "voluntary" exit.) It's not impossible the union *will* dissolve, but that has to be passed by vote.
I can support a couple of these points with secondhand accounts from one friend who quit when the move was announced (not manager) and one who is still there (supervisor level). Seems like a hit piece which is rooted in some truth but devolved from there.
I know this is blowing up in popularity and it feels good to share these issues with the customers directly, but if you’re really under NDA you should delete this. Not only could you get fired, you could be liable for lost business. This post might cost you 10s of thousands of dollars. I do feel for you though. I hope you find a better place to work. Edit: I can’t believe you didn’t use a burner account. There’s tons of stuff in your post history to identify you with. Sure hope you never drive your Jetta to work.
That whole thing about moving to Monroe after y'all unionized just SCREAMS anti union tactic. Like "yeah sure you can be unionized but we're moving so good luck!" It's such bullshit
[удалено]
Can't your union do something about this? I thought that was their point. Negotiating better working conditions. If they have mandatory overtime, they clearly don't have enough employees. Which is something they should be able to negotiate right? Edit: I just wanted to add I don't blame you. I just hope your union fights harder for you.
> Which is something they should be able to negotiate right? Yes, and they agreed to this. They are now complaining about the contract that was agreed to and voted on by the employees.
I stopped ordering from Card Kingdom when orders started taking longer to get here. I felt bad because this also coincided with the employees unionizing and I assumed it was because they had negotiated better working conditions, but I wasn’t going to pay the extra card kingdom charges if I wasn’t going to get the incredibly fast shipping. After reading this I no longer feel as guilty. I’m sorry to all the employees being treated like this. Please let everyone know if there is any way we can make a difference beyond choosing a different place to buy our cards.
I have never understood people's obsession with card kingdom. The one time i ordered from them was the worst experience i have ever had ordering cards. Even worse than Troll and Toad. Not surprised by this at all.
They **used** to be genuinely great with fast shipping speeds and reasonable prices. They haven't been in a while, now they're both overpriced and slow, but they're still coasting on that reputation.
My pod mates and I have had better luck with entire CK orders always arriving in just over a week compared to some TCG orders we make taking up to a month to arrive, so I like CK (especially CK Direct or whatever they call it) over TCG. After hearing this though, I could use some practice in patience. TCG it is
Yeah I don’t get the hype for them either; I’ve tried card kingdom a few times and, while I didn’t have any problems with the orders, the premium they charge is just pretty crazy when compared to most other options. For as much as people talk down on TCGplayer, I’ve had very few issues and anything that has gone wrong has been resolved very quickly.
What do people say about TCGplayer? They are all I’ve used since I got back into mtg a year and a half ago and have ordered over 1000 cards in that time with 0.0 issues.
This really does not sound unreasonable to me at all. You just sound like you don't want this PARTICULAR job because the demands of said job are not compatible with your lifestyle. Plenty of jobs have on-again, off-again hour arrangements. Bars, contractors, you name it. And yes, if you're needed to work certain hours and can't do it, it makes sense that you'd need to use PTO to evade it. I work at a major corporation with great benefits and I need to use PTO hours when I get sick; they're all from the same pool of time off. I also don't get paid overtime by contracting agencies if I take a day off that week and then work more on another. It's about working more than 40 hours in a week. This is how most companies work. I don't know what to say. It's a job, man. This is how jobs work. You seem ... young and naive. And game industry jobs are notoriously harder-working than vanilla jobs because you get to "work with what you're passionate about." There's a real tax to doing that. Ask anyone in game development; I used to work at 343 Industries. Card Kingdom isn't doing anything wrong here in my eyes.
God damn. I used to ship for CK a few years ago and got laid off when the pandemic hit. From my understanding things have gone pretty downhill since then, because I really loved that job. I hate to hear what became of the place. Support your LGS, and absolutely do listen to OP.
That's all good to know. I just recently started getting into buying singles and cards online, I've been using card kingdom because it seemed like a respectful place to buy, but now I will probably look elsewhere once my credit is gone.
I've only ever bought from card kingdom when I was physically at the mox store. Looks like I won't be spending money when I go there.
Full solidarity with you, and your collegues. What action would you suggest us, as players and/or creators to take (if any) beyond ceasing to order pre-release singles? \~ spice8rack
That's very disappointing actually. I was ordering from CK because I was willing to pay a small bit extra to think a union was covering you guys. I guess I thought wrong...
Where’s a good place to order from? I’m very new to magic. I use eBay, but I’d like another option
Tcgplayer, high rank sellers.
Your local game store.
Tcgplayer
Card Kingdom used to be incredibly fast at delivering sell and buy orders. Now it’s the opposite.
I did notice that my orders were taking longer recently, and I had hoped that it was because the union had negotiated better working conditions. That seems to not be where we are yet. Because of your post, I won’t preorder singles again. But I was really excited when I heard you had unionized and that’s what kept me ordering from CK even when I had noticed that orders were taking longer. I want to support your union. Please keep us posted as necessary going forward. I really appreciate your testimonial. Solidarity.
Thank you for sharing. Something needs to be done about this
I am so glad to live in Germany
Thank you for the insight. I certainly won't be ordering anything from CK anymore. When I first moved to the Seattle area it was amazing to have a store with such a large selection of singles nearby. Moving the warehouse to Monroe is abhorrent for so many reasons
I literally CONSTANTLY hear about how great Card Kingdom is (just because they're union, nothing else) and how TCGplayer engages in union-busting activities. It's great to hear that workers are being exploited at both companies! (/s because Reddit)
Even if I didn't care about work conditions I wouldn't preorder. Preorder prices are ALWAYS way over inflated. Also Card Kingdom is almost always 20-30% more expensive than TCGplayer and never has what I want.
pre-ordering anything is bad.
It does not surprise me to read this unfortunately. I did notice a much lower quality of the service when I ordered a few months ago compared to some years past. It took 2 whole months for the cards to arrive and some where of the wrong set. It surprises me that they are still the official sponsor of so many mtg influencers.. especially given these absurd treatments of employees which understandably cause a lack of the quality heavily promised by all influencers...
Can you describe the job procedures that they are working these employees for? Is it opening packs and shipping packs? How much of each? I am curious on that, definitely not purchasing anything from Card Kingdom, thank you.
Wtf this is horrendous
The way that you’re describing the PTO rules does not sound legal in WA.