Pros
-You get to have a lot of great experiences creating memories for guests.
Cons
-HR does not care about you. If you go to them with any concerns, they will steamroll you until you give up. -Too many money-hungry business practices. We are taught to hide the prices of add-ons as much as possible so that people spend more. It feels very scammy. -There is a constant push for upselling. They don’t even seem to care about the experience anymore. All they want if for you to harass people to get extra items and purchase the promotional gift cards. Corporate does not seem to realize that inflation is high and no one has extra money to be spending $100+ on a bear. They seem to think that the decline in traffic and sales has nothing to do with that and that we are just not trying hard enough. -Upper management is so out of touch. It seems like they have no idea what it’s like to work in a retail store. -They do not care about their bear builders. This is such an emotionally taxing job, because you are expected to be at 110% at all times. You’ll be singing happy birthday to one guest and then comforting a crying adult who is making a bear for their dead child 30 seconds later. Corporate acts like that is an easy thing to do and treats bear builders like they’re disposable. -Poor communication from district managers. Unless you have a good one, your DM will send you running in circles to find the answer to a question they could have answered in 30 seconds by sending a quick email. Did you send your DM an email about an urgent matter? Good luck hoping for them to reply before they go on vacation and leave you behind to deal with the aftermath of the issue at hand. -Horribly inefficient service desk. We are constantly being sent broken parts as a bandaid to slap on broken computers/stuffers/etc. You fill be expected to fix most issues yourself, despite having received no training. When they do finally send a tech out to fix something, they often do not seem to know what they’re doing. We’ve had techs come late, not show up at all, and install things incorrectly and have to come back three separate times to fix the same issue. -Payroll cuts. How can you expect us to get the same amount of stuff done, not leave guests alone for even a millisecond, and upsell as much as possible when you’re cutting payroll? **I literally watched my district manager try to upsell items to blind child with cancer while his dad was taking a phone call. I wish I was kidding.**