Where do I even start?
Everything at journeys is sales based. You have daily, weekly and monthly sales goals that are confusing and unrealistic. For example, every shift you work you have a dollar amount goal to reach (i.e. $625 worth of sales) plus your SOPs which are accessories. So if your daily goal is $625, a certain percentage of that goal has to come from socks (which are low quality to begin with), a certain percentage from other accessories, and a certain percentage from multiples (selling more than one pair of shoes in the same transaction). If you don't achieve that goal, you get fired after only three warnings even though you can't help it if its a slow day and no one comes in or people just don't want to buy shoes. They make up for this policy by training their employees to be super aggressive and even deceitful when selling to the customer. You have to bring out four pairs of shoes to every customer that they didn't ask for in addition to the one they did ask for, pitch socks and protectant spray to every single customer, and in general be really pushy and practically force them to buy stuff. If you don't do these things to every single customer, you get written up. Everything you do is designed to get the sale, even if it means tricking the customer. My training managers taught me to use certain wording to make the customer feel like they had to buy (i.e. "don't ask them if they want socks. just show them a few different colors and ask them which one they want so they still feel like they have options but still like they have to buy”) I was encouraged to lie to customers about my personal experience with the shoes that they were looking at to close sales. My manager even implemented a policy of “double pack socks” where she stapled two packs of socks together and told the customer that a pack of socks was nine dollars (which was technically true- ONE PACK costs nine bucks) so they would see the two pacs and think that the price for both of them was nine bucks, then we would scan both of the packages at the register and hope they wouldn’t notice they were buying two packs instead of one. I had to quit because I didn’t feel right tricking people into buying things they didn’t want or need just to meet my quota.
