Pros
- Access to art supplies if you're an artist - Ability to get hands-on knowledge and training of various artistic practices - Sometimes, your coworkers are really cool or you will meet and engage with a really cool customer - gives workhuman points which is cool but i think we would have preferred a raise instead
Cons
- The amount of labor you have to partake in is not proportionate to the wage you receive. They rely on artist's ample knowledge of various art supplies to answer customer questions both on the phone and in-person, in what feels like a teacher-student environment. They are severely understaffed at almost all locations, so you have to run back and forth between cashier/front-of-house, to stocking, to engaging with customer's conversations which would be manageable if there weren't like 3 people each shift. - I personally managed an entire department on my own and had to train management when I left with no significant raise in my pay grade. - I went through multiple managers through my time there, and each management style, regardless of who it was, relayed no positive forms of reinforcement to employees- everything boiled down to employee incompetence instead of realizing there was ample employee burnout. - The messiest management teams out of any job I've ever worked at in terms of like interpersonal gossip and really weird intra-employee engagement, like I thought the restaurant industry was messy - upper management only cares about sales and not employee benefit, the store had been structurally falling apart and framers (who are, perhaps the most burnt out, no matter what do not take a framing position as you will be forced to be a 2-team manufacturing machine that has no real benefit and is overworked more than regular associates despite making most of the money for multiple locations] were told to disregard their own feelings and good job on making money, by a person in a higher position than the general manager.