Making Every Little Thing Hard - Sales Associate Belk Employee Review

Management treats you like a worker drone. I was left multiple times to run multiple departments ALONE. We were often left scrounging for what we needed, such as register tape, trash bags, purchase bags, etc, and would have to repeatedly request items we needed that we couldn't access, such as stick-on security tabs. On big days, they would only schedule a single employee for high volume areas of the store, such as shoes. They make a big deal about people needing singular days off, even when given weeks notice, but then fail to put out a work schedule even a week in advance, making planning for events and travel almost impossible. The computers in the store are dinosaurs and literally won't complete functions the customers expect to be completed, and even for services we can provide we have to jump flaming hoops to make it work. We're told we're "empowered" and harassed if we call a manager, then are harassed for making decisions without calling a manager. We could literally hustle the entire day, stop for 30 seconds, a manager walks up and proclaims "There's a lot of standing around going on." We have to look busy or else we're assumed to be doing nothing, to the point where we make ourselves so busy with busy work that the customers have to come and search for us, as we're not ready or able to check them out when they need service. Our store got rid of the "Rock Team," so our store was constantly littered with cardboard boxes stacked higher than our employees, and we were expected to do all the unpacking, stocking, and cleaning up at the same time we were expected to be helping customers. Managers in our store would constantly be out messing with individual displays, and routinely demanded we relocate entire sections of the store, sometimes within hours or days, and often just before corporate visits or busy holiday seasons. Training was nonexistent for a long time, I was personally thrown to the floor without even POS training, but my last year it swung to the opposite extreme where training was literally 4 days long, and those new employees would note how outdated the training was once on the floor. People would be randomly fired for no apparent offense, even management positions would suddenly disappear, and our Loss Prevention Officer was even dismissed, so we had no security and no job security. Our store would put on competitions where the "losers" (whoever didn't get enough credits or whatever silly metric) would be pressured into doing something humiliating by management. We were constantly threatened with firing for multiple reasons. You could be the best salesperson on the floor, and they would threaten you during evaluation if you didn't get enough credits. Item locators were also pushed to an extreme, probably due to our store being routinely out of stock. Furnishings and shelves were flimsy in our store too, there were multiple events of employees having objects fall on them, which I have never seen in any other store. The signage in our store was all done manually, and had to be done constantly by hand. If a single table or display was missed in an entire section, the employee would take flack for it. Employees who didn't know how to do the signage who asked for help were told "It's easy, you just do it," then were berated when they got it wrong.