Alright, this is going to be a douzy! This company is an extremely toxic employer who operates in a dystopian manner that would make an industrialist in a Charles Dickens novel blush. It’s an inhuman place to work on so many levels, so I’ll touch on the worst aspects:
The biggest issue is that Signet runs their jewelry repair division like an overseas “Sweat Shop”. The focus is on the overall number of pieces of customer’s jewelry, called “Units”, that a shop can push out in a day/week/quarter/year etc.
This combined with poverty-level wages enable Signet Jewelers to crush local Mom’s & Pop’s in multiple countries. New Apprentices, who have huge responsibilities, and work under the pressure of the company’s “production” obsessed system, were getting $15/hr - minimum wage in my state as of last summer. C Jewelers earn around $17.80/hr, B Jewelers $19.75, and while it’s a big secret because it’s disgraceful, the A Jewelers earn around $22/hr. Note that these wages might have been adjusted slightly this year, as minimum wage increased, but the increments will have been kept roughly the same. Signet yearly raises amount to a couple CENTS per hour, meaning you can be a ten year veteran of this company and earning less than $25/hr. Oh, and it takes a while to get promoted up to that A Jeweler rank, which gets me to my next point/experience:
Management is extremely opaque about promotion (think WAGE INCREASE) and will absolutely manipulate you at best and lie to you at worst. I worked as a jeweler and endured a large degree of abuse at the hands of my Shop Manager, who repeatedly promised me promotion to the next level (Signet structures the bench side starting at Apprentice, then C Jeweler, B Jeweler, and finally, A Jeweler) only to keep pushing off when that promotion would allegedly happen. He promised “by spring”, then it was “you’re almost there, you’ll get it in the summer”…until we got to around Christmas and still no promotion. All the while he kept up his manipulative mind-game by saying “he wanted to help me get to the next promotional level so I could earn more money, because he cared”. I ultimately ended up having to take pictures of every large diamond I was setting as evidence that I had satisfied the requirements the company had set out in their jeweler’s promotional syllabus, which would have qualified me for promotion to the next jeweler level.
The manipulation and lying around promotion, and getting paid wages that made it a daily struggle to afford a basic life outside of work, created a constant strain in the shop, which led to suspicions and petty behavior. This negative factor influences the Signet work environment because you aren’t economically viable working for them.
Health insurance through this company was extremely expensive. I was paying around $7000/yr for a standard plan with a $1500 deductible. I have a similar plan with my current employer and I pay roughly half what Signet was charging.
The volume of “units” being pushed through the shop meant that a lot of work that should have been done to customer’s jewelry was not done. And these repairs aren’t inexpensive. I had to watch damaged merchandise go out to customers because the Shop Managers wanted it out of their shop so that they could enter a higher daily number into the daily tracker. (The daily unit total is updated daily in a local computer system so the district manger can further micromanage the shops - corporate already had the information but would not share it at the lower levels, so this was another example of extra management)
Trying to help the sales staff understand technical information *might* get you yelled at. I had one Shop Manager who reprimanded me repeatedly for explaining over the phone to sales staff why we could or could not work on certain pieces of jewelry or gems. His belief was that they were incapable of learning/understanding this information.
The quality of the jewelry you will work on varies greatly. Due to high Gold prices (~$1500-$1800/ounce when I was there, now $2700/ounce) much of the jewelry is very lightweight. This means that when you have a hundred tiny diamonds and no metal over them to hold them into the ring, any change to the ring will cause many diamonds to fall out. The low quality of at least twenty percent of the merchandise means that it cannot effectively be altered or repaired, much less quickly. Unfortunately, Signet sells lifetime warranties on all of their poorly designed pieces along with the quality items, meaning it’s all on the jewelers to try to fix these impossible rings. Usually we would put them back together to last long enough outside of our shop (>21days) that we would not get a rework called a “Make It Right”. That being said, reworks are common, customers were oversold bad product, and that’s your fault as a jeweler and on you when you can’t fix it.
Finally, there’s no advancement in this company. There are positions for Shop Managers that rarely open up requiring a cross-country move - to earn what, $50K-maybe $60K yr? For the record, Signet doesn’t say how much the Shop Managers earn, it’s a huge secret, so that’s just my semi-educated guess. As with everything with them, it’s less than you think money-wise. And after Shop Manager, you’ve topped out unless you know somebody in Corporate.
