L'Occitane reviews

Wages are low, upper management has unrealistic demands for endless reporting and tasks with tight deadlines that leave little time for selling. They expect one person to do the work of three people. Micro management gets in the way of sales & customer service. Daily sales sales targets are often absurd for stores with lower traffic, which makes it impossible to achieve the monthly bonus. If you do make or surpass your sales target it's still not good enough if you don't sell enough Divine cream. Smaller stores have one person on staff to open & close and are overwhelmed by too many tasks & tight deadlines, so much so that when a customer comes in they start to feel resentful. The computer system is very slow and breaks down constantly. The internet provider is in France & they don't have emergency 24 hour tech support! Twice it was down for 24 hours, (once during Christmas), which meant we had to do hand written sales all day & then input all of these sales before the next day's opening when the system was working again! Every month there are pages of new specials that require inputting different codes for each product & half the time they don't work. This makes the sales associate look unprofessional and keeps the customer waiting = bad customer service! Many customers are in a hurry and simply walk out. The company is very disorganized and communication is bad. Emails come in constantly from several different departments who obviously don't communicate with each other. All have last minute tasks & demands that "will only take a minute" but actually take hours to complete.

This company is incredibly unprofessional when it comes to the workplace. I worked in a small boutique and I would have to open/close by myself. There were days where I was alone for hours. I felt unsafe because we only had fake cameras and no security. There is also unfair responsibility for employees depending on which store they work in. For example, at the small boutique where I was located as a part-time employee I was expected to open/close, clean, change windows, shipment, operational, and then sell. In a large or flagship store, a part-timer does not have all of those responsibilities. L'Occitane really needs to redesign how they organize their stores. The biggest disappointment was that after all I had given into the business as a part-timer in a small boutique, they decided to move me to a flagship store and cut my hours from 18-20 hours a week to 6 hours a week. I was incredibly upset because it was insulting and rude. Plus, no upper management even gave me a reason why they were moving me and cutting my hours. I also noticed that many other part timers were moved around and some got more hours then me. I found this to be extremely unfair treatment. Another problem with this company is that they do not educate their employees whatsoever on their rights. There are no safety, HR, or any sort of trainings except for product knowledge. They want their employees to feel powerless and instead play a political game to be kept on the DM's favorite list. Lastly, L'Occitane needs to learn that the people they hire is not be taken lightly. They hired people by posting an ad on craig's list for a job fair (you could only imagine the type of crowd that brought). I've worked with many unprofessional employees and under qualified managers. It's a shame because L'Occitane is now a place of gossip and cut throat competition between stores and it creates a horrible atmosphere and place to work.