Disorganization, no communication, lack of innovation, overwhelming frustration.
Pros
Some of the best body care products I have ever used (ie: body butters, hand cream, oils, hair care, scrubs, soaps and shower gels.) Promoting the Girl Scouts and donations and drives to local charities. Good values speaking to inner beauty and protecting the world we live in.
Cons
Totally out of touch with the US Market, no one cares about Leona Lewis or Lilly Cole. Lack of innovation. Specifically the Leona Lewis items were literally the same product we currently had on the shelves, just repackaged. No one bought them (see above) and they were then discounted to 50% off during our summer clearance sale. If your options are buying a product at full price or buying the same product with a different label at half price what would you buy? Consumers are onto our sales, they know that the current holiday scents are exactly the same as the 2012 ones and they already have a stockpile at home because in January 2012 they were 50-75% off. Super discounts yet nickel and diming the customer. Hi, buy a Groupon, in fact buy four Groupons and three Living Socials all during a time when people are actually coming to the mall for a change. Sorry, you can’t use them on Black Friday, however we are running the Black Friday deal all week, so feel free to use them Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday or Sunday! Individual product is B3G3, Gift Sets are 30% off--- with the exception of store made gifts (like customers really understand that) and our gift cubes which are 2 for $12. “Wait, isn't this technically a gift set?” Groupons can be used with Love Your Body discount but not with any other coupon. You can use this coupon but with your LYB discount you will actually be under the $50 mark so you actually cannot use this coupon until you buy more merchandise. Black people wear makeup too! How embarrassing is it to live in a day and age where we are supposed to be celebrating our diverse American culture yet we have no makeup for women of color. No one wants to look like they just walked off the Walking Dead set. New product yay! Oh wait, the distribution center is out of stock for the next two months, sorry! Communication, or rather, lack thereof. Our mall offers free marketing to retailers; we cannot partake in that because we are completely in the dark as to what the next promotion might be. Even the mall marketing liaison is baffled. What does upper management even do? No voice mails on weekends, even during holiday season. You spend hours uploading schedules into a program and completing weekly reports that are not reviewed by your manager. Conference calls are a vehicle for those who enjoy hearing themselves talk. Loss prevention? Convoluted POS system. There are separate programs for daily communications, punching in and out and generating reports. If you are lucky it will take you 2 min to log in. Computer connection time is unbearably slow; luckily most of the clients are regulars so they understand. Competition is fierce-- with the company website. Rarely do the sales in store match the online promotions, which of course is mind boggling not only to an employee but also to customers. If the store is running a B3G2 and online is running 50% off with free shipping over $15, why would you shop in store? Poor online customer service. When product arrives to the customer from online and it is damaged, frozen, melted or duplicated in error that customer now has to drive however far away to the closest Body Shop to return/exchange the product. Horrible HR department. Payroll made an error in my pay relating to taxes. They decided to dock my pay to make up for this error—without telling me first, I just woke up one payday to half a paycheck. I had to call HR three times, was volleyed back and forth between two different departments who were blaming the other for the error for a week and a half before I got an answer. I was actually told at one point that someone was on vacation, and they could not help me. The poor sales are, of course, the employees fault. Management seems to be unaware of changing consumer patterns or unwilling to accept the fact that massive discounts are leading to poor profits The distribution center. Fact: if you stack 15lbs of body butter on bar soap, the bar soap will get crushed. Out of date training materials. The books that we are required to use to train employees are out of date. The entire fragrance line is completely changed and several of the skincare lines are obsolete. However, the company started a new training program for a select number of shop managers and poured money into training materials, gifts and conferences. I’m confused by this logic; we forgo essential product knowledge training for all, so that we can train a select few on nonessential items.