Pros
-Great products! -Great discount! -Room to climb the ladder -Great experience is the retail industry -Goto place for recruiters from other companies -Free pair of shoes each year -Great programs for full time staff (school, computer purchase programs etc) -Managers get paid well
Cons
-Managers work excruciating long hours -pay plans being rolled out in certain states that cut pay heavily -secret shops are poorly designed (easy to fail if you don't have proper coverage, and you will be written up for this.) -Low payroll, understaffed constantly, never enough coverage. -some of the customer base is difficult, rude and entitled (you will see this often). -sales standards are difficult to meet during season changes as shipments are difficult to keep up with and demands for extra hours to keep stock up to date can't be met. -extremely low pay for part time associates * Commission scale associates as paid either no hourly or $1 or $2 and expected to make the rest in commission, managers are given grief if their associates don't make minimum wage with commission (which happens some times) and the company needs to pay them more out of pocket to meet minimum wage requirements. -Sales and promotions, have become common place, and change frequently and sometimes without notice, causing visuals to be very challenging to keep up with. -very little corporate communication, impossible to plan ahead as you aren't told what sales, promotions or what items to expect to arrive in your store. -shipments are challenging, you don't know how many boxes to expect, no clue what will be in them until they arrive. (Weekly reports give you capacity numbers and how many shoes to expect in transit that week, which eases burden only slightly. -training is rediculous, training materials are only just recently coming into existence. -District to District, things are wildly different under different managers -corporate holds onto the customer is always right attitude, meaning if you get a complaint, no matter what the customer says, it's the truth. Your words or those of your team mean nothing. -very much a "cut your part timers hours." "Send them home early." Scheduling system. Burden for Store managers and Assistant managers is huge, expect to be over worked, exhausted, and paid decently for it.