Sales associates actually work incredibly hard for minimum wage. The responsibilities are overwhelming and ridiculous. You have to wear their clothes and the current colors for the season. Even with a discount, keeping up with their current fashion trends can be financially crippling. You also have to wear fashionably matching shoes that are usually uncomfortable. At least you're allowed to take your shoes and clothes off in the store if you're uncomfortable. Don't worry, if you were wearing the required layers of clothing, you could strip all day long and never even come close to being naked!
The team incentives don’t really have a wow factor either. The quarterly team incentive is (not to be specific) more than $9 but less than $11, to buy clothes. You also get a plastic animal print tote bag to put it in. (remember I said quarterly) Another team incentive is if you sell a certain percentage over last year. Every month your store meets this goal, you get a goody box full of high calorie snacks and candy. I personally would have appreciated being sent a treadmill every other month.
You're also scheduled for long shifts by yourself and still expected to meet your sales goal, greet customers and be floor aware while you're stuck at the register. If you don't meet your sales goals they have a conversion chart that shows how many people enter and exit your store every hour. You may have to recall everything about those customers and your situations to prove that you were really working. You know like, Ups came in at 11. Kristy Customer's husband walked in and out six times at 12. Wanda Window shopper talked about her rash from 1-2 . And if you DO meet your sales goal then you have to discuss how you will make it even better your next shift! We talked about the "numbers" so much that "UPT", "ADS" and "MCC" felt like they sound; a disability.
As far as having a leg up on the competition, Maurices takes it to a level I've never seen before. As a suggestion while out networking, you can go ahead and snoop around in competitor stores to look for numbers through open doors and unmanned registers. If you can get an associate to just offer up the sales goals by simply asking for them, then you're awesome! You have an amazing ability to get people to do what you want them to do. This makes training a team a whole lot easier. I think you need a psychology degree to think of something like this and probably have a serious untreated medical condition to actually execute it.
Another con is that they tell you the hours are flexible but they don't tell you that they'll schedule up to 4 weeks at a time. If you don't have school activities or appointments requested by the time a schedule is posted, then you have to ask your teammates (with the same issues) to work for you. You are told that a request is a request and don't ever expect a weekend off. Moms usually end up calling in for their kids because it is a scary situation to be put in.
If you do interview for a position at Maurices, be prepared to be interviewed at least 3 times. It's like trying to get into Fort Knox. Regular customers that interview for a position usually stop shopping at Maurices because they're so embarrassed that they didn't meet the qualifications after being built up by the highly motivating recruiting process. Then when you see these poor people outside of work, they want to know why they didn't get hired. You might have to tell them something like "We all lied on our applications and said we were Rocket Scientists. Did you? NO? Well that's why you didn't get the job, silly!"
Maurices is a highly stressful and unorganized environment to work in with little rewards for the average associate. I definitely felt used and abused. The rewards for upper management are amazing but you seem to have to set aside your family, fear of flying and a few morals to be successful. I would definitely not recommend working at Maurices if you; 1) are a high school student currently failing public speaking; 2) are anyone that actually did fail public speaking; 3) have common sense.
And if you still want to work for Maurices, that's great. Just make sure you're getting fair pay for the amount of responsibilities you'll have. Sales associates should ask for at least $40 per hour and a personal assistant. Entry level should ask for 2.5 million and a sleeping bag.
