Think carefully before joining Vitacost
Pros
1. Close to top to executives. Current CEO is a legend in this industry and very easy-going and hard-working;current CMO and CFO are very knowledgeable, too; 2. Headquarter in Boca Raton is only one-story and easy to evaculate during emergency; 3. It has a self-service store selling its products, which is very convenient for employees to buy snacks; 4. Some employees are very very talented even the company itself is small; 5. There is a small gym for people to work out. Employees can take shower in the building too. 6. There is 10% discount for employees to order from the website.
Cons
1. There is no cubles and open working environment is very noisy. It is difficult for people to concentrate on working. Particularly difficult for technical people to write code and have deep thinking. You have to put headset to be focused on your job, which is very annoying. 2. High executive turnover rate and high employee turnover rate. For example, for IT department, it had 6 CIO/CTO in the past five years. Majority of new employees stays about 5 or 6 months with IT department and will find better job very quickly. Those people who choose to stay are either not competitive or at the end of their career. So the system constantly has issues. IT people like to excuse themselves by blaming marketing or top executive not investing enough in IT. Company is outsourcing IT jobs to India too because of this problem. 3. It lacks coordination among each department. Particuarly there is strong conflict between IT and Marketing, who always blames each other. Marketing people like to say "It is all IT's fault" and IT people like to say "What is going on with marketing, company is losing money thanks to Marketing's smart spending". 4. Company fires people without giving any explanation.Normally every Friday morning somebody will be fired in front of all the employees, which makes a lot of people unconfortable. Because of that, more and more people left the company without giving two-week advanced notice and those people are actually very good employees. 5. There is a paradox in this company. Really good people do not want to stay with the company and they are actully the type of employees company needs.In the same time bad employees are good at flattering the top executives to keep their job, because they are not competitive in the job market. 6.Company is consistenly losing money, averaging $5million per quarter in the past one and half year. Company is cutting employee's benefits. A lot of peole are working under stress.Some emplyees have to constantly visit doctors and take certain medicine to work in this company. 7.Several people in marketing lack the basic ethics and professionism. The only thing they are good at is blaming other people and hiding their own mistakes. They only report good numbers to executives and hide the bad numbers. People with ethics find it extrme difficult to work with those people.
