Being in the investor showcase market and so close to Wall St. makes expectations sky high. Its ok because so are my personal expectations, but reducing payroll quarter after quarter and the demands of being a model store takes it toll on everyone. SM hours were well above 60 a week due to work load and lack of payroll. Gets to be a challenge to keep your staff engaged with all of the extracurricular activity of visits, and all the energy expended on preparation. Benefits are too expensive and you could actually do better buying them yourself. Investor visits with little prep time. Upper management in corporate constantly in the store. Stores in most of the other part of country had even less payroll and none of the salary. My training manager was with the company over 5 years and made less than 40k for a 2mil gross annual sales store. Its is extremely hard and almost impossible to balance work and personal/family. If you work for an incompetent DM, its game over. If your DM works for an incompetent RM, it could be game over for your DM, and who knows what kind of crony they'll be replaced with. You have to run the store schedule and you don't get to write it according to holiday, weekend, or expected increased volume days. Its computer based so its based on averages. There is very little flex involved and if store standards falter for any reason, this will be the first thing looked at to assign blame to the SM. Shrink can get out of control if you didn't hire correctly. Training is the same at every other company, you go into training and then into the frying pan so you have to be a good a reactivity when you can't be proactive.
