Corporate micro management and local management ruin any chance of success and cause massive turnover.
Pros
Decent pay for full timers, Sundays off
Cons
As a lifelong artist with extensive knowledge of painting, conservation, and art materials, I was able to make a real difference and use my creativity to frame customers' art and keepsakes to the best of my abilities. I accumulated about 50 or 60 customers who would only come to me. As time went by though, corporate began to severely limit us as to what we could do through their relentless micro management and control from over 1500 miles away. At first we had access to every tool and material in the store in order to ensure that custom frame orders would get done properly and in a timely fashion. For instance, I could restore frames that came in damaged, which was inevitable. Rather than simply throw away a 150 dollar frame, I would repair them and put them out for sale, and also prevent delays in the completion 0f custom orders. Corporate forbade that after about a year or so, by limiting the actual tools and materials that we could use to a pair of needle nosed pliers, a hammer, an awl, a Phillips head and a regular screw driver, a hopelessly out of square wall cutter designed for cutting large sheets of foam core board. Materials were limited to mostly just the standard cheap matboard they stocked for customers who needed mats cut, glass, and foamcore for backing. According to their rules, we were really not supposed to spend any more than ten minutes with a customer! But reality is of course something all together different. I did some very creative and unusual framing jobs, which required more time initially consulting with the customer, and more time to execute when the materials arrived than was deemed necessary by corporate. Rules also stated that the framer in the evening must cease ALL framing and proceed to "recover" the entire store 2 hours before closing at 8 PM. Meanwhile, customers would still come in with projects and questions and custom orders that were due the next day absolutely had to be finished on time. So the single framer on duty in the evening would have to juggle 4 or 5 tasks at once and was expected to do everything perfectly. Management at both the corporate level, and the local level is completely out of touch with reality in their pursuit of The Almighty Dollar. Every evening, our store never had more than six people on the enormous sales floor to help customers. Hobby Lobby thinks that they are saving money by shaving payroll hours and unrealistic expectations of the few employees they do have.