Hard work, little reward - Store Manager Dollar General Employee Review

-Pay is decent at best especially when you factor in the actual hours worked for salaried Store Managers, less than $2.00 more than a typical Assistant Manager. -Bonus potential is a joke, especially when you consider the fact that 40% is taken out immediately by taxes. Maxing out on sales over last year at around 25% for a quarter nets you almost $400, for 3 months of hard work to keep sales up. Total bonus potential is nearly half of comparable companies. -Hours required for a Store Manager to work in order to keep a store in the condition upper management expects is absurd. 6 days, usually around 60 hours a week, leaves you very little time for family or any sort of personal life. -Tasks are assigned weekly that are redundant and very hard to keep up with. Plannogram changes that often take away popular items and sometimes just move items around the shelves to a different spot. Aisles were extended and now are difficult for most customers to reach top shelf items. -Labor budgets are poorly maintained. Sometimes waited until the morning after the schedule was due to get the budget. Mid week changes cause sudden cuts in payroll forcing the Store Manager to work the additional hours. Everyone pays for one or two Managers' mistakes, when one or two Managers go over payroll every store gets cut on their payroll. When my store's sales were down over last year payroll stayed the same, when sales came back up over last payroll got cut. They tell you Store Managers have a typical work week of 48-52 hours and if you are working more than that then you have a staffing issue. Correct, the staffing issue is the lack of payroll given to stores that deserve more. -Cashiers are expected to serve close to 200 customers in a 6 hour period and front and face all shelves and stock merchandise, makes it very hard on hourly employees and often feel that they are useless due to not getting all assigned tasks done when they can hardly leave the register. -The basket size rule is not a great tool. Employees are counseled and eventually terminated based on low basket sizes which is great in theory however it's a mess on paper. Following the rules for this tool in my store would result in firing the entire staff, seriously no joke. -Promotion is so highly spoken about during hiring. During my interviewing I was concerned with one thing most, promotion, where can I go and how fast can I get there. Store Managers that would be unanimously determined the "star" of a district by their peers don't even get a mention of promotion and if you bring it up it gets avoided like the plague. -Shrink is nearly impossible to control given the tools and processes currently used. "Blind" receiving of around $30k a week worth of merchandise leaves a lot of room for issues out of your control. Store Managers never even see an invoice, just a receipt showing the number of cases for each department and a total dollar amount. In a training session one manager asked how the DC inventory counts worked out (audits), as in how much were they over or short by on inventory on hand where overages would mean the stores were shorted, and we were told that was irrelevant. Audits are not completed as frequently as they should be or around special events that should get an audit without any hesitation. Nevertheless, managers' jobs remain at stake and hourly employees are accused of being thieves with no proof due to high shrink.