This is a review from the trenches, not the corporate level. No doubt the experience at "corporate" is a whole different ball of wax.
The company is run top-down. Sales managers and associates are not solicited for feedback except in a very formal and politically correct way which leads to management getting basically meaningless information. Sales associates are evaluated based on parameters that are considered objective when they are not. In my store there was one register, and the person who "gets the sale" may simply be the one standing at the cash register at the time. Sales goals for the day are divided by the number of hours in the day, when sales do not occur evenly like this but more like a flattened bell-curve. This discriminates against sales associates working in off-peak hours.
Inventory control is crisis management at the onset of various buying seasons. Our stockroom aisles become absolutely filled with shipping cartons, with no room on the shelves for stocking, much less organizing the shoes. Inventory control can only work if you have room to organize; we don't at these times. You can't find shoes the customer wants, yet we are implored to "sell, sell, sell." Shipping cartons overflow into the sales area, or we "store" the shoes in a storage unit two miles away. These shoes are "in the store," but they aren't accessible. They may as well be in Timbuktu.
Store associates do NOT get paid time-and-a-half for working holidays. We are told we must work them, the same as store managers. But the managers get time-and-a-half at their higher wage, while the lowest paid employees in the company get straight pay. If a sales associate works overnight before Black Friday--and we were required to be open--he gets straight time. This, more than anything, indicates how the company feels about its sales associates.
