Mammoth McDonald’s Closes
“We’re hatin’ it,” say employees
The owner of the Mammoth McDonald’s, Kevin Mazzu, called his employees in at 7 p.m. on Monday, September 5, and told the approximately 20 employees that it was their last day on the job.
Some of them got “severance checks” for $400, according to several of the employees who were let go, but after deductions most of those checks amounted to about $200.
“We never thought that he was going to do that,” Carina Villanueva, who worked as a cashier at the Mammoth McDonald’s for 12 years, told The Sheet. “I started when I was sixteen,” said Villanueva, who is supporting a 2-year-old child by herself. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Yessenia Flores, who also worked as a cashier since she was sixteen at the Mammoth McDonalds, told The Sheet in an e-mail that Mazzu told the employees the meeting was supposed to be about “sales,” but suddenly turned into something else completely. Flores also has a child. “By the end of that meeting there [were] no screens anymore at the first lobby,” she said.
“One week before [the meeting], they started to break the playground down, and we asked why, they said [because] he was getting a new playground in. So they lied.”
Flores told The Sheet that all of the employees were asked to sign “papers” (likely non-disclosure agreements) before they were allowed to receive their final checks. She said that there was a translator there to explain what the papers said, but “I honestly didn’t understand what he was reading to me,” nor did many of the other employees. “Before those papers they said we were covered with money, because they were giving us extra hours and a bonus check that would cover from here till we found another job,” Flores told The Sheet. However, she said, the bonus check only amounted to $200. Not enough, she feels, to hold her over until she finds another job, particularly during the slow shoulder season in Mammoth.
