Pros
Amazing training program. In house management training levels, so you can constantly learn and move up. The clothing and 40% off discount! Sometimes the company will have a special extra discount event for employees too on top of the regular discount. Lots of benefits for full time positions. Hours can be pleasant, depending on the Store Manager scheduling and store hours (mall stores and outlet stores have different operating hours) Customers become your regulars, and you really begin to care about them and their lives! Stores close on major holidays. Chill dress code! The pay is good for such a small company.
Cons
Pressure to sell. One of the most annoying aspect is trying to sell the credit card and selling add on items. Customers have said they feel the pressure and it can get uncomfortable at times on the sales floor.ASL's and Store Managers will not let associates get away with zero credit card signups, sometimes in a demeaning manner. Lack of training in this area adds to the frustration for many associates. Training is not realistic. Yes, the training goes over alot of information and ground work about policies and rules.....BUT when dealing with the public, employees should have alot more practice and role playing concerning customer relations and customer issues. Training is just watching videos of bubbly, overtly fake associates in fake scenarios with fake customers. In real life, customers will cut you off, ignore you, refuse your help, interrupt your sales pitch, blame you for everything, laugh at you/the current sale/clothing trends, etc.... Management. If you are lucky enough to get an awesome Store Manager, he/she will give you that real world training and practice....if not, well you are on your own! This leads to poor communication and respect for the whole team. HR policies. If you do have a horrible manager or sales associate, termination is gonna take a while. It's so lengthy, that to get rid of someone, it could take up to 6 months due to policies of corrective practices. Basically the company wants to make sure, after months of store management mentoring the horrible employee, if said employee still sucks, theres evidence it did not succeed in improving employee's behavior or performance. So you are looking at another 6 months of bad associate performance. The company is growing too fast. Its getting ahead of itself. Mainly on the technical side. We have alot of new technology, sometimes our internet can't handle the traffic of 2 ipads, 2 laptops and 2 wired POS registers. We live in a small rural town with only 2 internet providers, high speed internet is hit or miss, so when it's a miss, our sales drop! Customers get impatient and angry, walk out, and we lose sales. Being on the front lines, we deal with it. Our only plan of action is calling the IT department and complaining. Sometimes it can be very frustrating putting in online orders for customers when the site incorrectly loads or goes down, or our credit card reader goes offline and we can only accept cash! Floorset moves and visual changes. This is probably the hardest part for most associates. Because retail works in quarters, refreshing the store every season is important for featuring new product and improving sales. But the company basically sends out a book of pictures to give your store team visual "direction" of how to move your sales floor around. Not every store is the same, some have different furniture or walls or even a different floor layout.....so obstacles soon pop up left and right. adapting to each problem and solving it can be a draining process, none the less explaining to your ASL for each decision and adaptation your team made given your circumstances. If your store doesnt look exactly like what the book shows, you can get written up for it. So pulling away and explaining to the higher ups why your store will look different is just another set back when your team is doing a floor move. Too many sale changes/confusing sales. Our store has counted 4 sale changes in a week at one time during the year......that is wayyyyy to much! And the more items on sale or if there are different types of sales going on at once, its very confusing to the customer! At the register, customers start putting back items because it's not on sale and complain there was a sign saying it was......when in reality it was mentioning another item on the same rack OR a specific item not the whole rack itself. We get blamed for the confusion when it's actually emailed to us the sale direction and where to put each sign. Very frustrating!!! Turnover. Its retail. Case closed. The need to be in 'style'. Even though we get a nice discount, the company pressures us to turn around and spend our money on the clothing we sell. Kinda backwards! For the full time employees, each paycheck is a much needed source of income to live off of.....turning around and giving it back to the company is ridiculous, like working for free! Can be pretty slow during off seasons. Pressure to meet sales goals get more intense because traffic drops.
