This company was fantastic to work for at first - responsive management, decent and reliable hourly pay, reasonable hours, positive environment, good support staff, and full schedules. Reasonable amount of dogs, pretty good scheduling, and they would be in the groomers' corner. Then the ceo of thumbtack bought the company and everything crashed and burned. They fired all the good support staff, they started communicating super badly - a lot of big changes communicated very last minute, with not enough information to follow through well. The scheduling got worse and worse. The groom prices kept going up and up and up but our hourly pay only went up by a few cents an hour. And theres no commissions. And since customers assume youre getting commission on these INSANE prices (almost $300 for a shavedown on a normal 7 pound dog), they dont tip often or much at all. Supplies started running out and not getting restocked. Management began telling some employees one thing and then other employees another, in transparent efforts to divide employees. Management became rude and condescending every time employees voiced their concerns. They started making base level groomers do management level work (safety assessments for new hires, interviews for prospective candidates) with no pay bump. The communication with customers and pricing became so bad customers were dropping like flies, so we were all just sitting at the lot waiting to get more dogs on our schedules for hours and hours. Often when i came out of the van at my appointments, customers would come out FUMING already because of how infuriating the communication with the customer service department was. They put AI cameras in the vans to watch us without telling us and we only found out because the cameras started yelling at us as we drove. They said they promoted internally, but they kept posting indeed ads for management positions that groomers were never told about or considered for. They told groomers they couls transfer to other departments but then wouldnt actually let anyone do it. CONSTANT slack messages, HUGE paragraphs of corporate crap that you had to read and respond to and download a dozen apps about that you only had time to read at home, uncompensated. It became really awful to go into work. I was so excited to work here, and it just tanked. I hope everyone here gets better positions somewhere else like i was able to.
