Sur La Table reviews

The benefits leave a lot to be desired. Full-time employees pay a reasonable contribution to cover themselves for medical/dental. However, if you are married or have dependents, the coverage is exhorbitant. The 401k match is only $0.50 on the dollar up to 4%. The bonus program is not generous and usually only includes full-time managers. When the company began to perform really well in early 2009, too many stores were meeting or exceeding forecast and qualifying for bonus, so they created a higher bonus goal in order to avoid paying out so much in bonus money. The stores tend to be dirty and understaffed as a result of not budgeting enough payroll to handle the task load as well as provide the high level of customer service that is expected. Hourly managers working off the clock in order to fulfill their job requirements is a rampant dirty little secret. District Managers look the other way. There is a serious lack of respect for the work/life balance of the store managers.

You are there to do your job, no more, no less. Don't expect to have any authority or gain any responsibility. Unfortunately the tools you have to work with are a complete mess, total garbage. There is no coherent process on how to do anything, unless ad hoc is the latest and greatest agile, scrum, kanban. There'a a lot of reacting and bright shiny object syndrome, so there's no real plan on how to implement correctly and execute well. No one's truly in charge, but there are plenty of people who want to have the last word. Leadership is defined by who possesses the biggest title and who made the final authoritative statement. Information (if it's available) that should be at your fingertips is buried somewhere in a system that no one has time to access, or knows how to access. Should you have the good fortune to finally locate the information you needed there's a good chance it's useless. No one has cleaned up the data, the IT systems are completely out of date (and not built to do what they're doing), the POS is running on obsolete software, the website hasn't been reengineered in over a decade, there's no CRM system, there's no CMS system, the computer you have will probably crash because it's running a pathetically old version of Windows. Sadly nobody wants to change any of this. From the top down they continue to look at the same things they've looked at for decades and try to glean some sort of insight. And when they see whatever it is they see they come marching through the cubicles looking for someone to blame, or unrealistically looking for someone to fix it. There are more than a few people here who can barely function in their job, promoted up thanks to their very long tenure. Good luck advancing your career in this kind of environment. So while it might look pretty on the outside, from those charming stores, it's ugly inside the office. It's time to get moving.