The Saddest Place on Earth

Museum of Ice Cream's L.A. branch (closed in 2017)
"Everyone's had bad bosses. I'd try to hammer home: something about this place was different. It was everything they stood for and everything they projected was so false. It was this pink, Kombucha-on-tap, millennial shitshow nightmare."
—anonymous Museum of Ice Cream employee

Forbes magazine staffers Alexandra Wilson and Maggie McGrath have penned a mortifying exposé of working conditions at the Museum of Ice Cream under 28-year-old toxic CEO Maryellis Bunn. A few excerpts:

• "Bunn insisted that everyone at the company choose ice cream nicknames like 'Strawberry' and 'Caramel' that they were expected to use instead of their real names."

• "Bunn's self-chosen moniker was 'Scream.'"

• "'I would regularly go on walks just to cry. We had one room that was called the 'crying room'… Bemoans another ex-employee: 'Even though she's half my age, Maryellis scared the f--k out of me.'"

• "Several workers said they were expected to smile, sing and dance ice cream jingles for eight hours straight—without bathroom breaks.… [One] hourly employee says that she needed to go to the bathroom to change her tampon, and had to announce over her radio walkie-talkie that she was on her period. She says she was instructed to 'hold it.' Four hours later someone relieved her and by that point she had become nauseous and bled through her pants."

• The MOIC laid off 200 employees in New York and San Francisco, and at least some of them would be fine if Bunn's pop-up empire never reopens. Though Bunn talks of reopening at the end of the month, that presents "a Herculean problem: the pandemic makes the prospect of jumping into a perpetually-trafficked vat of colored plastic about as appealing as licking the restroom faucet."
Refrigerator magnet wall at Museum of Ice Cream

Comments

Anonymous said…
Maryellis Bunn, meet Michael Govan. Michael Govan, meet Maryellis Bunn.

You two should go well together in managing museums or whatever.

Group hug.