Pros
Being able to "shop" the massive amount of back stock that cannot be jammed out onto the floor. Employee dress code is fashion driven. Fast paced, always numerous projects to be working on.
Cons
Schedules are made one week at a time. Due to my not being scheduled frequently on weekends, I often leave for the week without knowing when to return to work. The co-manager takes the schedule home with her often, and fails to fulfill her promise of phoning us with our schedule. Due to this, there have been numerous occasions where I have been called 20 minutes after I was scheduled to work without any knowledge of my shift. Also, shift times will be changed without our knowledge, so we will show up and then are told to go home because we are there at the "wrong" time. There is a severe gap in the line of communication amongst store management and upper management. I am basically in charge of visual merchandising, but am not recognized as such in my official job title or my pay. Pressure is put on the visual team to do literally an impossible amount of work and relocate merchandise. The floor set is based on what the district visual merchandiser did at ONE random store, using their unique selection of merchandise. Although we all get the same stuff, different regions of the country sell merchandise very differently. Management doesn't realize that as a visual manager, appropriate substitutions and changes are impossible to avoid. As long as the visual concept is well understood by the visual team, an product that is called out is used, these changes should be at visual teams discretion. Corporate directives for floor set are in turn impossible to execute, due to upper management's lack of acknowledging that each store and their individual needs and unique circumstances. Immature and highly inexperienced managers are a source of grief not only for sales associates, but for the company. In store management is a joke. We have meetings about elaborate new policies that we will be enacting, then no one ever talks about it again until one of the managers is up for a review and needs to hand in some sort of paperwork to appear efficient. I frequently open the store with any one of three managers, sometimes as early as 3 hours prior to store opening. I have sat and waited for up to 15, 30 and 45 minutes for a manager without even a phone call. The amount of product received on a daily basis combined with limited floor space as well as stock room space makes for a giant mess. This also affects our ability to keep the newest merchandise flowing onto the floor on a timely and reasonable basis. No direct deposit is highly inconvenient. Scheduling is based on sales, but if you are at work the majority of the time while the store isn't even open, how is sales an accurate gauge of one's performance? There is absolutely no feasible organization plan currently in place. Sales, stock and visual spend hours doing cleaning, lifting, organizing, etc, only to have someone come into the back and tear it all apart to find one item, especially managers.
