Bath & Body Works reviews

Depending on the management of your store, you may stay 2-3 hours after the store closed stocking and cleaning, and expected to stay later than your written schedule. There’s too much heavy lifting (like imagine how heavy your bag feels when you’re carrying 8 shower gels... yeah, well multiply that by about 5 or 6 and that’s how heavy product boxes were). Call-ins are a long running joke at B&BW. It’s where you are scheduled a “maybe we’ll need you or maybe we won’t” shift. You will have to keep your personal schedule open that whole day not guaranteed to work and call in 1-2hrs before that shift to see if they need you. It’s highly inconvenient and hopefully they’ve stopped that process since I’ve worked there. No growth past store manager. They don’t hire upper management like district managers and beyond from inside.

Lenient policies - This seems great when it gives you wiggle room to avoid negative customer situations (they can pretty much do anything they want because of the “100% guarantee” customer service policy and you don’t have to fight them); however, that can turn right around when HR wants to use something to get rid of you. In other words, policies are stated but not really adhered to in discipline. Example: Customers aren’t supposed to use more than one coupon in a transaction, but you are always encouraged to “do what’s right for the customer”. So they’ll allow it in several cases until the one time they don’t. It gives you a false sense of security. I’ve seen several seasoned managers terminated for very minor reasons so that younger, less-qualified people can take a smaller paycheck for the same job. The company also seems to be going through an identity crisis lately. It doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore. The Home Fragrance portion of their business has expanded exponentially (as evidenced by remodeled stores where White Barn now takes up half the real estate space), while Body Care (what used to be their bread and butter) has waned in the public interest. You don’t have to do anything to sell the candles, but you have to practically force body care demos on people to compensate for this shift. And nearly all the new attempts at body care are secondary riffs on the latest trends. You used to walk in other stores and see BBW fragrance knockoffs - now it’s the other way around. They’re trying desperately to find some relevance in the market, and the selling behaviors they force on you to make that happen are often unnatural and uncomfortable. Work-life balance isn’t great, but it’s retail. You know you’re gonna lose your weekends. The only thing out of the ordinary is that corporate will often change floorset dates on a whim and often at the last minute, leaving you with little time to change your plans or prep your new schedule. Communication from higher up is prevalent, BUT it’s not in a centralized location. For any given floorset, for example, you can receive info through email, in the weekly newsletter, on their internet community system, or in the physical pack-up they send you. This can make it very hard to keep up with information or remember where you read something.