The pay scaling is horrible. Associates who had worked there as long as I had were making less than people they had just hired. They also went from giving a 3% raise every year to 2% or less last year. As far as I know, they also still haven't changed their top out pay scale since before 2012. All of this while spouting corporate dogma about how they want to be the best sporting goods company on the planet and how they need everyone to give 1% more effort to get there.
As far as staffing goes, it's also not been a great experience. When they have plenty of hours, or when corporate is going to visit the store, they will push to give people all the hours they can handle. The second its over, they will cut hours so much that people who rely on them for a steady paycheck will definitely suffer. The problem is that they become horribly understaffed to the point that it becomes aggravating that they will push an unreasonable amount of work onto a very small amount of associates.
Another problem is how they decide to do things nationwide. The headquarters store in Pennsylvania serves as the starting location for the many bad decisions that they push out to the rest of the stores. They will use the hq store as the model for everything they push out, regardless of the fact that most of their stores are not built like the hq store so they cannot reasonably implement the things that are being asked of them.
Now on to management, which is to be honest, absolutely terrible at pretty much every level that I've seen. Starting at store level, you have assistant managers who are either unwilling or unable to do all the things asked of them. I've had assistant managers who are nothing more than glorified associates, who refuse to put in any more effort than is minimally required of them. I've also had assistant managers who care so much that the stress of dealing with all the shortcomings at every level that they burn out and either leave or stop caring. At one point, I had a store manager that had worked at a few locations and was beloved by his staff. Seriously, he had some people that were so dedicated to him that they followed him through two relocations to bigger and better stores. However, upper level management pushed so many bad decisions on to him that he had to leave, rather than try to lie to us about how positive these decisions were. After he left, we suffered through another couple rounds of incompetent or lazy store managers before I ultimately left before my sanity was gone.
Moving on to corporate, also known as the people who get paid the most to cause stress to those who are paid the least. Staffing decisions aside, the visits from corporate are a joke. In my entire time at my location, we never had corporate show up unannounced. The problem with this is that the store never looked like it did the majority of the time. Every problem was swept under the rug, so that no one ever got into trouble for any bad decisions that occurred. The worst thing about this is that it caused people at corporate to be able to ignore all the warning signs that were hiding just out of sight. This company, since I've started and left, is always willing to ignore the many complaints from staff as long as they are able to pass any sort of corporate inspection. If you've ever thought that they actually care about you, I'm here to disabuse you of that notion. They are very willing to push you for every last bit of effort and sanity, until the day you decide to escape.
