How a Dollar General Employee Went Viral on TikTok (Published in 2022)

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In January 2021, Mary Gundel received a letter from Dollar General headquarters congratulating her on being one of the company’s top-performing employees. In honor of her hard work and dedication, the company gave Ms. Gundel a lapel pin that read, “DG: Top 5%.”

“Wear it with pride,” the letter read.

Mrs. Gundel did just that by attaching the pin next to her name badge to her black and yellow Dollar General uniform. “I wanted the world to see it,” she said.

Ms. Gundel loved her job as a manager of the Dollar General store in Tampa, Fla. It was fast paced, unpredictable and even exciting. She especially loved the challenge of calming belligerent customers and chasing down shoplifters. She earned about $51,000 a year, much more than the middle income in Tampa.

But the job also had its challenges: delivery trucks showing up unannounced and leaving boxes in the aisles because there weren’t enough workers to unpack them. She spent long days running the store on her own because the company only allocated limited hours for other employees to work. Grumpy customers complaining about out of stock items.

So on the morning of March 28, between running the cash register and putting tags on clothes, Ms Gundel, 33, propped up her iPhone and hit record.

The result was a six-part critique, “Retail Store Manager Life,” in which Ms. Gundel exposed working conditions within the fast-growing chain of stores, with stores common in rural areas.

“It’s actually kind of bad that I’m talking about this,” Ms Gundel said, looking into her camera. “Technically, I could be in trouble.”

But she added: “Whatever happens, happens. Something has to be said and some changes have to be made or they will probably lose a lot of people.”

Her videos, which she posted on TikTok, went viral, including one that has been viewed 1.8 million times.

And with that, Ms. Gundel went from a loyal lieutenant in Dollar’s general management to an outspoken dissident in the blink of an eye, risking her career to describe working conditions familiar to retail workers across the United States.

As Mrs. Gundel predicted, Dollar General soon fired her. She was fired less than a week after posting her first critical video, but not before inspiring other Dollar General store managers, including many women who worked in stores in poor areas, to speak out on TikTok.

“I’m so tired I can’t even speak,” said one woman, who described herself as a 24-year-old store manager but did not give her name. “Give me back my life.”

“I’ve been so scared to post this until now,” said another unidentified woman, leading viewers through a Dollar General store as she discussed how she’s been forced to work alone due to budget cuts.

“This will be my last day,” she said, referring to Ms. Gundel’s videos. “I’m not doing this anymore.”

In a statement, Dollar General said, “We provide our teams with many ways to speak up, including our open door policy and routine engagement surveys. We use this feedback to help us identify and address concerns, improve our workplace and better serve our employees, customers and communities. We are disappointed every time an employee feels we have not delivered on these goals and we use those situations as additional opportunities to listen and learn.

“While we don’t agree with all the statements Ms. Gundel is currently making, we do here.”

Before March 28, Ms. Gundel’s TikTok page was a mix of posts about hair extensions and her recent dental surgery. Now it’s a daily digest dedicated to fomenting rebellion at a major American corporation. She is trying to build what she calls a “movement” of workers who feel overworked and disrespected, and encourages Dollar General employees to form a union.

Almost every day on TikTok, Ms. Gundel announces a new “spokesperson of choice” — each one a woman who works for or has recently worked for Dollar General — from Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and other places. These women are assigned to answer questions and concerns from colleagues in those states, and most are hiding their identities for fear of losing their jobs.

Social media not only provides employees with a platform to vent and connect with each other, it empowers ordinary workers like Ms. Gundel to become union leaders in the post-pandemic workplace. Ms. Gundel’s viral videos emerged when Christian Smalls, a Staten Island Amazon warehouse worker who the company derided as “neither bright nor articulate,” organized the first major union in Amazon history last month.

Ms. Gundel – who often dyes her hair pink and purple and has long painted nails with which she cuts open packages at work – has apparently been able to break through because other employees see themselves in her.

“Everyone has their breaking point,” she said in a telephone interview. “You can only feel unappreciated for so long.”

Ms. Gundel planned a long career at Dollar General when she started working at her first store in Georgia three years ago. She has three children, including one who is autistic, and her husband works for a defense contractor. She grew up in Titusville, Florida, near Cape Canaveral. Her mother was a district manager at the Waffle House restaurants. Her grandmother worked in the Kennedy Space Center gift shop. Ms. Gundel moved to Tampa in February 2020, just before the pandemic, as Dollar General’s store manager.

The store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a workforce of about seven people, she said. But at the end of last month, she only had about 130 hours to distribute, which is one full-time employee and one part-time employee less than when she started.

With not that many hours to devote to her staff, Mrs. Gundel often had to run the store alone for long periods of time, usually six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay.

Ms. Gundel’s protest was prompted by a TikTok video posted by a customer complaining about the shoddy condition of a Dollar General store. Mrs. Gundel had heard these complaints from her own customers. Why do boxes block the aisles? Why are the shelves not completely stocked?

She understood their frustration. But the blame on the workers is misplaced, she said.

“Instead of getting mad at the people who work there, who are trying to handle all their workloads, why don’t you say something to the real big people in the company?” Ms. Gundel said on TikTok. “Why don’t you demand more from the company so that they actually start funding the stores to get all these things done?”

Ms. Gundel quickly tapped into a network of colleagues, some of whom had already come out about challenges at work. Among them was Crystal McBride, who worked at a Dollar General in Utah and shot a video showing her store’s dumpster filled with trash people had dumped there.

“Thanks guys for adding some more dirty work for me,” Ms McBride, 37, said in her post.

She said in an interview that Dollar General fired her earlier this month and her manager warned her about some of her videos. As someone who walked out of an abusive relationship with “only the clothes on my back” and lost her 11-year-old daughter to cancer in 2018, “I wasn’t afraid of losing my job,” she said. “I had no intention of silencing.”

Neither does Mrs Gundel. As her online following grew, she continued to post more videos, many of which were increasingly angry.

She mentioned a customer who had pulled a knife on her and a man who had stabbed her car in the store’s parking lot and tried to yank her through the window.

She said the company’s way of avoiding serious problems was to bury them in bureaucracy. ‘Do you know what they tell you? “Put a ticket,” she said.

Ms. Gundel started using the hashtag #PutInATicket, which other TikTok users tagged in their own videos.

On the night of March 29, Ms. Gundel posted a video saying that her boss called her that day to discuss her videos. He told her to review the company’s social media policy, she said. She told him she was well aware of the policy.

“I wasn’t specifically told to delete my videos, but it was recommended,” she said in the video. “To save my job and future career and where I want to go.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“I had to respectfully refuse” to remove the videos, she said. “I feel it would be against my morals and integrity to do that.”

Ms. Gundel also received a call from one of the senior executives who had sent her the “DG: 5%” pin she had been so proud of. Mrs. Gundel insisted on recording the conversation to protect herself. The director said she just wanted to discuss Ms. Gundel’s concerns, but did not want to include it. The conversation ended politely but quickly.

On April 1, Mrs. Gundel reported to work at 6 a.m. “Guess what,” she said in a message from outside the store. “I just got fired.”

She added: “It’s pretty sad that a store manager or anyone has to go viral on a social media site to listen to, to get help in their store.”

Ms. Gundel continues to post videos regularly and recently started driving for Uber and Lyft.

While Ms. Gundel’s union effort may be a strenuous one, some say she’s already made an impact. In a recent TikTok video, a woman who shopped at a Dollar General in Florida credited Ms. Gundel with forcing the company to spruce up the store she shops in.

“Look at the fridges, everything’s piled up there,” the woman said as her camera panned down the aisles. “They’ve got toilet paper up to the roof, you guys.”

“Thank you Mary for going viral and standing your ground and standing up to companies and losing your job because it wasn’t done in vain,” she said. “I’m proud to enter a Dollar General now, because look. Look at it.”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.