Corporate is extremely controlling, from how you dress to merchandising to how you interact with your fellow employees. Corporate is stingy with hours and doesn’t allot enough time/hours for their staff to properly organize their backstock or clean their stockroom properly. They throw defective product in the dumpster to be put in a landfill and said you’ll be fired if you do otherwise. And they make sure to destroy functional product before tossing it to keep divers from getting anything. Even though they’re owned by Hot Topic they don’t want you do look like you work for HT. Want you to dress preppy or like you are at a disney store. no unnatural hair or piercings allowed. no black clothes. no funky belts. no lanyards?? (they’re “too hot topic”). Corporate does not want you to get to know or befriend your fellow workers and will fire you for doing so. This creates poor morale at work and the feeling that everyone hates each other. The product is over priced, they even sell the same merchandise that is available at Hot Topic but charges 10$+ more for the same EXACT product. They only carry the bare minimum anime and gaming selection, only getting product for the most popular titles, and do not cater to the core community whatsoever. at least 50% of the product is disney merchandise. They have the clipboards to write what fandoms to carry but they don’t mean anything, because they will only carry merch for specific titles, which i feel is misleading to the customer. Corporate expects you to sign every single customer up for their rewards and encourages you to mislead people about why we’re taking their information and sign people up without their consent. They reprimand associates for not pushing the rewards on customers that don’t want to sign up. Corporate wants us to focus on medallia reviews, which often complain about ease of check out being a problem, but then expect us to also be pushy about the rewards. The poor employees are made to track the subtotal of every customer they don’t sign up for the rewards to send to corporate. Managers are scheduled to be on the sales floor but there’s nothing to do for 80% of your day. You’re standing around folding shirts as management. Regular associates are just cashiers most of the time and are expected to just stay and stand behind the register their entire shift. Employees only get 30 minute lunch breaks even if working a 8+ hour shift. Our store was understaffed and not given enough hours to get workers to stay. there is often single coverage in the mornings with no cameras in the store, which i believe is a HUGE safety issue. Lastly the product we sell is often low quality novelties that you’d be much better off buying elsewhere and from more reputable places. Product is often pulled from the floor for “legal issues” which is extremely questionable. I would not recommend working here.
