Great for busy people looking for part time work, but not nothing else. - Retail Sales Associate Columbia Sportswear Employee Review

-Extreme lack of communication. News and updates or anything important seems easily lost in the shuffle between Corporate to Management down to associates. This tends to result in confusion among associates and management about even the most basic policies, products. and procedures. Ultimately, the customer is the one who suffers when they hear 2 or 3 conflicting facts about a product or a policy. This also becomes a problem with the day to day duties of work. When management is not all on the same page, things can (and sometimes do) quickly become chaotic. -No Leadership. The store manager is far too self-involved to worry about the associates or even the morale of the team as a whole. Instead of listening to a legitimate concern of an employee, the door is swiftly shut on the subject entirely and the issue is never resolved. This is also a common practice when an associate expresses their work availability before schedules are made. Frequent scheduling mistakes are made, even after a form, specifically designed for availability changes, has been established. An important aspect of leadership is to lead by example. It is very difficult to follow the example of a store manager that is constantly late, takes unacceptably long lunch breaks, spends much of the office time on Facebook, ignores employee concerns and blatantly lies to associates. -Unprofessional management techniques. Management doesn't seem to have any clue how to handle certain situations. Lies have become a more prominent method used by management to keep the employees "in line". Corporate has established a secret shop once a month in its stores to examine and evaluate the performance of the associates. Which is fine, however, management has now decided to hide any news of a secret shop from the employees for fear that the employees will "slack off" once the secret shop has taken place for that month. This is not only insulting to the associates, but shows a serious amount of distrust, and makes the employees feel highly unappreciated. Instead of handling a minor problem on the sales floor professionally and efficiently, the store manager would instead rather scream at the employee in front of the customer. This again is where the customer is the one who ultimately suffers. -No advancements. In the little over 2 years that I have worked for the company, there has only been one promotion within the store. There are no full-time employees (other than management) and it has become abundantly clear that any form of raise or advancement within the company, is simply not an option. The employees are constantly hearing complaints from management about payroll and how there isn't enough and how difficult it is to manage. Then, instead of promoting one of their own well deserving employees, they turn around and spend the extra money for an outside hire. -Questionable Corporate directives are carried out...without question. Corporate will sometimes send down an order that bares no logical reasoning. Unfortunately, the management within the store doesn't seem to make an effort to find out the reasoning or at least gather more information. This results in, for example, the associates mindlessly counting the number of men and woman that walk into the store. This doesn't seem too bad unless you understand that the store is already equipped with automatic counters to keep track of customer conversion.