A socially progressive, environmentally conscious retail company
Pros
- Wages are excellent relative to most of the retail industry/environment. - Benefits package is also excellent (Medical/dental, 401K, profit sharing, paid vacation, employee discount, etc). - People who gravitate to employment at HPB tend to be friendly, intelligent, creative and capable, making for a quality work environment, socially. - HPB promotes from within. Management positions, etc, are filled from existing staff, not from outside the company. - Business policies are fair and honest. Profit does not trump ethics. - As mentioned in the title, the company is socially progressive and works hard to be environmentally responsible. - Frequent opportunities for employees to volunteer for special projects.
Cons
- Though the company has been around since the early 1970s, it can still seem amateur. It has a hard time defining and committing to its strengths. It also seems to have difficulty measuring the success, or failure, of it's practices, as well as a short memory regarding what has been tried already. This results in frequently shifting directives/procedures, the recurrence of practices that were previously deemed unsuccessful, and a lot of energy being wasted on trying to fix things that aren't broken. - Communication from the top down can be poor. Lots of lags and hiccups with the dissemination of information. - Scheduling: This is retail, so there's a lot of working nights, weekends, and holidays. It's a struggle to maintain a social life with your 9-5 friends and family. Also (though not the case for every storefront), staffing is kept pretty svelte, meaning that it can be struggle to get desired time off, and the work environment can be stressful. - Sometimes there's a disconnect between corporate headquarters and the front lines. Policy, procedure, and tech rollouts sometimes fail to address the needs and realities of day-to-day work in the storefronts.
