The entire corporate culture is one steeped in denial. To paraphrase an old saying; management straightens the pictures on the walls while the store burns. Everything is a facade...and the piano plays on! The floor managers are 20 year-olds who are reminiscent of The Stepford Wives. Rather than being truly helpful, they parrot useless idioms in robotic fashion under the guise of leadership. With a flip of their long hair and a clickity-clack of their requisite high heels, "no worries" seems to be their latest phrase gleaned from the management (cheerleaders?) handbook. However, the reality is that there are plenty of worries and problems for those of us working on the sales floor.
The consistency of the "cons" which have been expressed in most of the "glassdoor" reviews are right on target. It matters not which Von Maur location or which management team:
1. TESS scheduling system is vicious to all employees and their families. It has no heart. It has no conscience. This system has caused good employees to resign and demoralized those of us remaining.
2. Mandatory 6 day work weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
3. If your department is fortunate enough to have more than one employee scheduled, you can bet you will be pulled into another department, a department with which you have no real familiarity, and often a significant disparity in hourly sales goals. For example, if you must sell a minimum of $275.00 per hour in your own department, and are sent to cover another department with an hourly goal of 125.00, at the end of the day, you must somehow make up the difference. Management makes no allowances for the bind in which they have placed you. If this were simply a case of an hour or two a week, that would be fine, we would all be happy to help out, but due to perpetual short staffing, spending several hours a week covering other departments is the norm.
This is a stressful situation for employees as well as our customers who expect the sales associate in a department at Von Maur to possess excellent product knowledge and be able to deliver superior customer service. If you work in the jewelry department and get sent to cover lingerie, God help you when a woman drives an hour to the store expecting to be properly fit for a bra. That customer complaint will land in your file and will haunt you at review time. No matter how many customer compliments and accolades you also receive, it takes only one customer complaint to be denied a raise. The customer is always right, the employee is always wrong, period.
4. The lack of grace regarding the "1 minute late and you are tardy" policy while fully expecting you to be available to work past your shift.
5. Antiquated, sexist, and plainly inappropriate dress code for women. Women must crawl around on their knees to pin alterations, clean the carpeting edges around mirrors and along the fitting room walls, and offload boxes of stock, etc, in skirts and pantyhose.
6. The physical condition of the store is becoming nasty. Areas of carpets need to be replaced, the freight and customer elevators and escalators frequently break down, hooks in fitting rooms come out of the walls and it takes months to get them replaced. Inexpensive items such as plastic sizing rings are scarce. There are never enough fixtures and many are broken and remain in disrepair. Sales staff have been asked to clean up the woman's restroom when customers complained about its condition and no housekeeping staff was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon!
7. A 1% commission rate that is simply penurious and miserly.
