Pros
Earthbound offers an environment that makes it easy to want to help customers and get the store looking its best. The products it offers are fun and interesting, and employees are given a 50% (!) discount on most merchandise. I worked for an excellent manager and a good team, even though this followed turmoil after the store's former manager and and later assistant manager walked out the job, leaving a disheveled team and plummeting sales numbers. Once staffing and management stabilized, the experience for employees and customers alike improved greatly.
Cons
The corporation itself often displays little to no regard for its employees. As a keyholder, I made an abysmal $7.50/hour, whereas sales associates make minimum wage. Sales bonuses apply if you meet or exceed your monthly sales goal, but at only 1% of your sales, it doesn't amount to much. Earthbound seems to want to attract and count on their workforce being part-time high school or college students. Even as a manager, it is close to impossible to make a living wage at Earthbound. The particular store I worked in faced considerable turmoil because of the walk-outs of its previous manager and later assistant manager. The assistant manager had been placed in an impossible situation following the manager's walkout and blamed by the company for falling sales in the post-holiday lag, which was normal and expected as a retail chain. Once the new manager had been selected and hired, the assistant manager himself walked out. Particular season changes can be more taxing than others. In the summer, larger merchandise shipments often mean drastic changes in the layout of the store and merchandising schemes. This itself is normal and a natural part of working retail, but when many changes have to be made by usually only two employees during regular hours of operation, the job becomes full of pressure and anxiety. In my particular case, our team included one individual whose extreme emotional instability was so severe that nobody could work with her, and I was most often paired with her because I was supposedly more stable and could handle her more. As she felt pressured and overwhelmed by the job and its demands, my job soon began to include primarily managing her intense emotions and inability to stay focused on the job. Her behaviors were never directly addressed by management, just "managed" and "contained" at the expense of my nerves. It's a retail job, thus evenings and weekends are mandatory, including for management.
