Pros
Upper management is a nightmare of favoritism and for a company that preaches diversity, it’s truly incredible how many straight white males are running major key positions. You work for your fellow staff, including fellow managers in the district and associates ect. When it came to upper management it’s nothing but one video call after another of being bombarded with unrealistic expectations and publicly shamed when goals aren’t being met. This included yelling and some management even talking down to non-native English speakers as if they were stupid. Pretty embarrassing for a company whose major platform is the diversity they insist is present. Don’t speak to women as if they’re stupid. Don’t talk to ESL management as if they don’t know what’s happening, I assure you, the wokeness you shove down the throats of everyone is an absolute joke.
Cons
Where to start? I will say that when I first started with the company 10+ years ago it was a delight and for awhile I too was “drinking the koolaid” of Arc’teryx as a whole. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the ethos of this company has been skewed since it’s major takeover from China just a few years ago. Money is the only thing that matters to upper management anymore, and the pandemic was no exception. They took thousands of dollars from the government in loans and still laid off some of the key staff in corporate that had been with the company for years and years. No shock that the staff they let go were the ones speaking the loudest about how the store employees should be treated with more respect. These were people who had been around for 10 years or more. They let them go over a video call that the entire company saw. They didn’t even have the decency to tell them offscreen, they fired them in front of a live audience. A small severance package and a pathetic excuse of budget cuts was all those people got. A month later and all of the sudden we have 30 new spots in corporate that need to be filled. They found someone else who could do the job cheaper basically. But that’s not all. Those spots were replaced with Lululemon employees who jumped ship in an attempt at a huge corporate restructure and if you think we didn’t notice that all of our bosses were all of the sudden incompetent unqualified lululemon employees you were wrong. Also as a native woman with friends who are native Squamish I find it distasteful that you “thank the Squamish for their lands” every phone call, but only have one native woman that works for your company that you proudly display on every video call like your token employee. If you wanted to support the native people you would donate and not put it on social media for likes, but do it because it’s the right thing to do. Also, standing as an ally for my fellow employees, your culture of micro aggressions and fat shaming for individuals is blatantly repulsive. Your company is already non size inclusive but the way you speak about plus sized individuals and the rhetoric around who you think should and shouldn’t be included in outdoor activities is archaic and downright cruel. I had a fellow employee get off a video call where your upper management made comments about their size. I couldn’t believe it but they taped that video conversation so feel lucky that they still works for you and aren’t filing a harassment case. Leaving this company was the best decision I’ve made in a long time. There’s an environment of “working yourself to death for the sake of the team” that I just couldn’t be apart of anymore. Not to mention the multiple labor laws that were broken monthly due to upper managerial oversights. If you want to work for this company I highly recommend working in another outdoor company like Northface or Patagonia, at least they don’t preach “wokeness” and you’ll go into it knowing it’s about the money instead of being lied to like they care one second about the people who work for them.