Sad Decline of a Once-Great Company
Pros
- Great coworkers - Better-than-average pay (for retail) - Generous employee discount - It's fun to design elfa At Century City, the staff is smart, eclectic, and fun. TCS pays even its part-time employees better than minimum wage, and full-time employees are sometimes paid very well. The employee discount is OUTSTANDING. Finally, elfa is fun to design... and you're likely to get scheduled for more hours every week if you're an elfa designer. If you're part-time, you'll have to be pushy to get them to train you on elfa, but it's worth the effort.
Cons
- Inadequate staffing, combined with unpredictable (and sometimes punitive) scheduling - No possibility of career advancement - Unethical management TCS used to be a genuinely great place to work. The company totally changed after being sold in 2008 or thereabouts. To save money, they stopped staffing sufficiently, so the stores no longer look pristine, and employees are insanely busy and stressed all the time. Management also changed the focus from helping customers to hard-selling them, which often makes things unpleasant on both sides of the transaction. The weekly schedules go up with only a couple of days' notice, and if you can't work on a particular date (even one for which you've given a month of advance notice), management may punish you by giving you virtually no hours the following week. No matter what promises you've heard, if you weren't hired as a full-time employee, stop believing that your hard work, great results, and fantastic attitude will eventually earn you one of those positions, because it'll never happen. As for you full-timers, you should abandon all hope that you'll someday be promoted into management, because those positions are filled by external hires. And oh wow is the management shady. I'm literally unable to explain (glassdoor required that this post be edited), so I'll just say that I've never encountered anything like it, before or since. Actually, it's probably just as well that I'm not allowed to describe some of what happened there, because most people wouldn't believe it. TCS is ethically problematic on a larger scale, too. The company is profoundly hostile to unions, and management expresses shock that any employees might want to organize for something better than the amaaaaazing perks already bestowed on them... a sentiment that only became more pronounced in the middle of a multi-year salary freeze. (Incidentally, other than the employee discount, a mediocre 401k plan, and decent-for-retail pay, there aren't many perks. The vast majority of associates who are part-time get no paid holidays, vacation, or sick time. However, they ARE given the option to purchase health care. That insurance is fine if you only need maintenance care, but god help you if you get seriously ill, because it's woefully inadequate for anything other than checkups.) Publicly, the company also regularly claims that it "never lays people off," which is a lie. They simply stop scheduling some employees, and others they hire as "seasonal," then keep them on indefinitely after the holidays, then don't count them as layoffs when they decide to let them go. If you can't find another job in this tough economy, or if you just really want the employee discount, then working at TCS might be worth it, at least for a while. But please go in with your eyes open, and leave as soon as you can land something better.
