Pros
The focus on international products: crafts and foods A fairly inclusive company environment The customers are fun and love the products
Cons
It's sad when 3 very positive points are overshadowed by the cons. I get that this is Retail, but the company seems to have a split-personality: is it more like Walmart or is it more like Pottery Barn? Other area retailers pay higher starting wages. The employee discount is a little higher than other retailers, but when most employees are barely getting by and often barely have enough for groceries, gas, and other necessities, it's no surprise that many employees can barely take advantage of the discount, anyway. We employees know how much our stores pull in: the stats are always shown to us. Yet, with the wages offered, lack of full-time positions--and no benefits offered because of that, stores across the country are unable to sufficiently hire enough staff. Our busy store has had half the amount of staff needed for close to a year. We only seem to attract teens with the pay offered: they call out OFTEN because they don't have adult expenses to worry about, they don't care about not having company benefits as they're insured through parents, they don't want to do anything besides punch in and out, they don't care about the recorded messages from corporate about selected products because they don't drink wine and prefer pizza to brie and crackers... THEY JUST DON'T CARE ABOUT THE COMPANY. Yet, THIS is who we hire because we're SOL otherwise. We're losing employees who did care about the company. The company might be doing well making monumental sales with skeleton staffing, but that's temporary. This is NOT how a company thrives. It's the holiday season and we're losing sales and customers because our storage areas are filled with 2 or 3 weeks (or more) worth of deliveries that we can't unpack in time. We're constantly declining curbside orders because we can't locate the product as it's stuck in pallet purgatory. We don't have enough staff to cover registers, assist customers on the floor, stock product, and fulfill online orders. You know the episode of I Love Lucy in the candy factory? That's how it feels in the stores, but it's not funny--it's burning out employees. How much time is wasted on the daily product messages by corporate? The truth is, most employees don't care about the latest wine promotion, or the newest sofa, or the new international snack because we're staffed with mostly jaded teens who don't drink alcohol (hopefully), who wouldn't know an ottoman from a pouf, and who think Brie is just a name for a girl. Does World Market want to be a trendsetting retailer or just another Walmart, Target, whatever?