Terrible Company Culture, Work-Life Balance, and Pay/Benefits - Anonymous employee arrivia Employee Review

*I worked here when it was still just ICE (International Cruise and Excursions).* The company uses a point system to punish employees for every minor infraction, even when it is outside of their control. They see employees as expendable, and don't make any accommodations for people when life happens. You are expected to come in early and start working without being paid until your shift starts, as well as working after your shift is over, including on weekends, even if that was not part of the job description you agreed to when you were hired. As part of seeing employees as expendable, they forced employees to work in a building that was still under construction and not approved for occupancy by the Fire Marshal, resulting in illness and injury--notably, they even had everyone evacuate the building through the back when the Fire Marshal arrived, so they could say the building was unoccupied. Executives/management have been known to sexually harass female employees. Executives/management were almost exclusively white people. The only real upward mobility in the company is a single step up, and no further, unless you're good personal friends with the owners. The (now former) owners operated other businesses out of this one, including having employees of this company perform work for those other businesses, as well as having them run personal errands on a fairly regular basis. Since most of the staff is doing sales, the company, as a whole, is used to paying people less than they are worth--even when you are not a salesperson--and trying to get a raise is like pulling teeth. The health insurance you can get through the company isn't very good for how much you have to contribute from your paycheck. The 401k program is basically worthless--they sent an email bragging about increasing their match to 1%. "Rewards" for performance were almost exclusively given in "P3 Cash," which was fake company money that you could only use to buy things from the company, and the prices for those things was incredibly high. On the rare occasion actual gift cards were given, they were deducted from your paycheck. While they tend to treat non-sales staff better than the salespeople, if your role isn't directly tied to making money, you are just the bottom of a different barrel to them. "Mandatory Fun" is constant, and you are shamed or punished for not participating. They purposely foster a noisy, disruptive environment for the sake of having a "festive atmosphere" in the background of phone calls. They routinely spend large amounts of money on things that look nice, at the expense of things that actually need to be purchased to support the company's operations or reward its employees--notably, in a year where they gave laughably small raises, they also spent around $150k on a chandelier, and around $80k on a rear-projection glass wall for the lobby, while also rejecting the purchase of critical IT equipment that had been approved for the budget initially to replace 14 year old systems that were dying. They also purchased Apple computers for all of their executives because it "looks good in board meetings," despite the entire company being built around Microsoft products. The company loves to tout how over 90% of the software they use was developed in-house, but the software is garbage that constantly breaks, runs on outdated equipment, and doesn't measure up to industry security requirements--notably, at one point it was discovered that one employee developing that software had an unencrypted Excel spreadsheet of credit card information on their laptop that was acting as the database for one of those pieces of software for the entire company. Along the software lines, they chew through IT security personnel, because instead of buying the tools they need, they insist that the IT security personnel build them from scratch, and then require them to be in the office every day, even when they have been working overnight to avoid interrupting operations. The company purposely dragged their feet on becoming PCI compliant, because it would cost too much money, thereby exposing their customers to vastly greater risk of identity theft and credit card fraud than necessary, and only fixed it because American Express and USAA put pressure on them.