Pros
Love the variety of people one meets in retail setting. Met many good friends here. Passion for sports nutritional supplements (albeit many of questionable quality). passion for vitamins, herbs, other supplements. You enjoy discussing exercise, health, alternative medicine, losing weight. there is an employee discount, considered by some as substantial (bear in mind many items are overpriced, so the employee discount only becomes valuable when you apply sales or clearance prices too.) If you love sales (believe it or not - most people dont know this - it is heavily commission driven). do as you are told (not allowed to voice opinion) and meet all sales goals, you might get quick advance to manager position, assuming a store is near your area; otherwise you might have to relocate if you want terribly that manager position. Despite the numerous negatives about the company, and if you can balance the heavy toll of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly (and by the way, some goals are hourly!! - believe it!) goals for sales; and maintain some compassion and empathy towards your clients, you will be able to help people, who will be very grateful and will become regular customers and loyal friends. For those of a more liberal mindset, there is not a strict hiring procedure, so ultimately you have choices to make after hire: you can stand out by performing well, and be one of the few who receive hard fought praise; or, you could skate by, because the job could be viewed as easy if you would rather be a low performer. If you are prone to addictions, working here might help - might. Knew someone who managed to kick his alcoholism, because of 2 reasons: learning about, and the money spent on supplements steered him away from drinking and into the gym.
Cons
horrible treatment from management, generally from regional sales director (rsd) and above. especially bad is the aloofness, arrogance and general lack of compassion and empathy (the very qualities you need in treating your own customers) that corporate management has for store employees. i have see many good to great people, sales persons, employees fired for pointless reasons, because they make mistakes (ethical and procedural) from the pressure. even if the company has had a logical reason to dismiss someone, they use very harsh tactics to extract information from them, squeezing confessions out of them, then terminating these good people, now with a black mark against their time at the company, during which they gave their all. One manager was summarily dismissed (terminated) while at a regional meeting just for voicing a complaint! No matter what these people did , most of them deserve second chances - at least! every day they came to work, they were giving the company a second chance! if you only knew....i wish i could tell you more...