Pros
Apart from the employee discount, unfortunately there are few other pros to this organization worth mentioning. Other employees (seniors, peers or subordinates) can be nice and are at times pleasant to work with. Some fun activities outside work (company is involved with lots of great charities, so walks and races etc., but then every company in NYC does that so I don't think it's really all that unique). We get 1PM Summer Fridays between Independence Day and Labor Day, which is awesome (4PM from Memorial day to Independence Day).
Cons
This company is in lots of trouble and it's really unfortunate because there's tremendous brand value and respect to tradition behind it. That's probably where the problem starts though. So basically unless you're an executive in the Merchandising area of the company (it's the area where you'll find people responsible for selecting the merchandise assortments you purchase in the retail stores, and who generally walk around the office acting like primadonnas and the entitled--psych! you're working at Bloomies honey, not Bergdorf, or even Saks for that matter), you're essentially a nobody. People just don't care about you here. There's no sense of career-building, no real direction for employees outside of the buying dept. (and this problem plagues the department store organization, dot com group, and outlet group). So you often get the feeling that you're just being taken advantage of, kept around to make sure your boss makes his bonus while you barely scrape by. Speaking of, the salary levels are pretty low when compared to the New York City average. And then they try their best to encourage the fact that your discount is a big deal (like hello? who likes to give their money back to their employer all the time?). Raises have been anywhere between 1.5%-3%--I've never heard of anyone getting more than that during my five years of employment here. The HR department are a bunch of useless people--I really don't get it. But then again, HR folks are typically hired to prevent lawsuits, not to make sure employees are happy, right? That's exactly the situation here. They never follow up, don't ask you how you're doing, don't care about what you want to do here, and are absolute genuine sycophants (like many other people here) There's some stupid dress code which half the company follows, the other half don't (looking at the Marketing dept. here). Bloomingdale's is pretty much a textbook example of a company with a lot of young employees who are doing all the hard (mindless) work while the seniors/baby-boomers collect the check and protect their positions as much as possible (almost every "manager" is a lifer, and has been here for at least 15 years). Promotion? Ha, maybe once every seven years, if you're lucky. I've been here for five years and always seem to miss the promotion boat. Meanwhile every season there's this massive popularity contest where they hold an award ceremony dedicated to recognizing the season's top buyers and practically nobody else. Rinse repeat. Technology-wise, not much to say here. We're forced to use programs that were written most likely in the 1970s. It looks like The Matrix. I think I'm using an 9 year old computer--Word takes sometimes 30-40 seconds to open. Basically the technology is kept intentionally in the pre-historic era because otherwise the seniors wouldn't be able to work here--they can barely understand using Excel as it is. Oh, and we use Lotus Notes, yup! So as a result of all this, there's tremendous turnover in almost every area of the company, and it's recently gotten much worse (especially on the dot com side, where I see at least 1 new face every 2-3 weeks). The marketing department looks like a block of swiss cheese, and the accounting department? Hmm, well I don't even know if there is one, because in all my years here, I've yet to see some sort of official communication explaining to me just how well this company is performing--they will, however, send out emails all the time telling you when the next big employee discount day is (always timed conveniently around pay day by the way--really? as if we're that stupid?). Which brings me to another point: absolutely no transparency. It's opaque. We're never given any strong sales information nor are we given any true update on how well the company is operating (apart from a monthly "central address" where they have this stupid exercise on reviewing 'what's hot, and what's not' without actually telling you how much they sold). For all we know the company could be bankrupt (again?)? Maybe that's why they're not telling us? Oh and i'm sure we throw away unheard of amounts of money. Unheard of amounts. Look people, if you're a career-driven ambitious individual, looking for a fulfilling position where you actually learn, are surrounded by bright people with the same level of commitment, are paid well and have an ok-to-good time while you work then by all means stay away from Bloomingdale's. Very conservative company ("but that's our culture!" is the response when you bring this up), extremely old-fashioned and just out of touch with the times and reality. It's sad, because this brand is great, otherwise. Another poster here mentioned something about this place being a career-killer? I couldn't agree any further. Once you get sucked in, you'll never get out, and no one will ever want to hire you because they somehow know how truly terrible this place is--maybe they read the glassdoor.com reviews? lol!