Workers at Mud Bay, the boutique pet supply chain, say they’ve experienced a degradation in labor conditions after the company experienced a slowdown in sales in 2023.
Once a small local business, Mud Bay now boasts 64 locations across Washington state and northern Oregon. According to internal messages sent to staff and obtained by Real Change, the company lost more than $3.5 million in the first six months of 2023 alone.
Mud Bay’s recent financial difficulties appear to be an outlier in the industry as a whole. In March, the American Pet Products Association announced that total U.S. pet industry expenditures reached $147 billion, a roughly 7.4% increase over 2022 levels. However, the industry group says that, four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, consumers appear to still be splitting their purchases between online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Although Mud Bay does offer some local delivery options, its main attraction is its reputation for friendly, professional staff and excellent service. But some of those employees say they are increasingly being overworked and underpaid.
One worker at the Mud Bay Belltown location spoke to Real Change on the condition of anonymity. They said the company rolled out a “voluntary restructuring program” in October 2023 to reduce its labor costs in light of the losses. Some of the changes included reclassifying full-time workers down to a range of 32 to 40 hours a week and asking employees to work split shifts to optimize staffing for the busiest times. The company asked workers to sign a document agreeing to the restructuring program; however, those who didn’t sign on were still folded into it.
Mud Bay also announced it would cancel its Mudstock 2024, an annual companywide convention in which employees get to meet representatives from pet product manufacturers and receive a variety of free products.
The Belltown worker said that despite the restructuring, many workers held onto the hope of receiving an annual cost-of-living raise.
“They told us in October we were expected to still get our raises, but this [restructuring] was just necessary,” the Belltown employee said.
However, when December came around, Mud Bay announced it would not provide those raises. Instead, the company offered a sliding scale of one-time bonuses, ranging from $50 for employees who have worked at the company for less than six months to $500 to employees with more than 10 years. As of 2024, Mud Bay’s base pay is $20.83 an hour, less than a dollar above Seattle’s minimum wage of $19.97 an hour.
Previously, the company has advertised to prospective employees that it calculates its wages based on the MIT living wage calculator. That calculator estimates as of February 2024 that a minimum living wage for a single adult living and working in the Seattle metropolitan area full-time is $28.70 an hour.
“So the main thing that we’ve been struggling with is being told ‘it’s not going to happen again, you’re gonna get your raises, you’re gonna be fine,’” the Belltown employee said. “And it just gets cut and cut.”
The worker also said that due to staffing shortages at their store, workers have had to close the store without a shift lead 20 times between August and December 2023.
In addition to low pay, workers also reported that the company uses a punitive system for dealing with outages and conduct. If a worker calls out of a shift without prior notice and does not have enough PTO, they can accrue a “point.” The company also awards points for arriving at a shift late, making too many mistakes at the cashier’s desk or cursing while working on the floor. If a worker accumulates seven points, they can be fired. Full-time store employees receive just eight days of PTO a year, including both sick leave and vacation.
A former employee who used to work at the Mud Bay Queen Anne location until it closed at the end of December said the point system made a person’s job security directly tied to whether they had a good manager or not.
“It was a month into me working at Mud Bay, and I could not have feasibly gotten enough PTO hours to cover a day off,” the former worker said. “There was just no way I could have worked enough to do that. But I had gotten sick, and I needed to take a day off. I would have gotten the point, but luckily my manager was like, ‘I don’t feel comfortable giving you one because this was out of your control.’”
The former employee added that they witnessed the point system being used to punish workers who were on management’s bad side.
“I have definitely seen managers play favorites in that regard,” they said. “If they don’t like you, they will really seek out opportunities to give you points so they can maybe push you out.”
Both employees said they feared retaliation from management or impacts to their severance agreement if they disclosed their identities. Another former Mud Bay worker declined to comment because they were worried about the company’s potential reaction.
The reportedly hostile working environment is in sharp contrast to the company’s progressive and welcoming reputation. The Belltown worker said they were initially drawn to work at Mud Bay because it looked like an accepting environment for queer employees.
“It just felt so nice to be accepted and be part of a community of people who really cared about animals and something I was interested in,” the Belltown worker said. “It was one of the first places where I could be publicly out as nonbinary and people actually respected that. I really enjoyed the job for the first three months.”
However, they added that they felt this support, like other issues related to wages and conditions, was conditional. After a customer made a complaint about the Pride-related decorations in the store, management decided to remove all of them except for the flags.
While the company advertises itself as employee-owned, the majority of shares remain controlled by the Wulff family that founded Mud Bay and their close friends and associates. Additionally, workers who talked to Real Change said that effectively, workers have no say in the governance of the company.
Mud Bay did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The former Queen Anne worker said Mud Bay’s decreased investments in its employees could ultimately harm the company’s famed reputation for good customer service.
“Knowing the customers who frequent Mud Bay, they all seem to care about us a lot,” the worker said. “And we can sense that from working there. I just want them to know that the company is not treating us well and that the experience they are getting at Mud Bay is because of us.
“The reality is, employees don’t have any power, but I think the public does. If people are more aware of what’s going on at Mud Bay, I think more can be done; if there’s pressure from the people who are putting money in these executives’ pockets.”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the May 1–7, 2024 issue.