Pros
-Great employee discount. It's 30% off, but there are ways to get shoes for incredibly cheap prices. I've gotten a $100 pair of Brooks for $15, and various others too. -Depending on management, it's a very easy job with a friendly work environment -Easy to get used to -PTO (Accumulates kinda slowly though)
Cons
-Every DSW I've been to has had god-awful air conditioning. So if you hate the heat, this may not be the job for you. Depends on location of course. -It seems like whenever DSW tries to improve something, they make it worse for the employees. For example, DSW got rid of scanner guns and replaced them with iPhones. Believe it or not, the iPhones are much slower and a lot more of a hassle to use. Also, they very recently replaced our scheduling app, Dayforce, with a new one called ADP Workforce (or something. I never even bothered to look at the name). The user-interface is astoundingly terrible and now it's a hassle to even check when you work. -Corporate is awful to deal with. As just an associate, you're likely never going to have to deal with anyone on the corporate side, but managers are constantly hounded for unrealistic scores and numbers. There is a district manager who had 5 main store managers quit because he was just unbelievably awful to deal with. During a bad snowstorm, he made a manager from a different DSW location drive 45 minutes away drive all the way to our store just to open it because our store's manager couldn't make it to work. We ended up closing early and only had the store open for about 2 hours because the snow was so bad and no one was shopping anyways. He then, called my manager and screamed at her over the phone for not driving to work during the snowstorm. For reference on how bad the snow was; I only live about 15 minutes away and I saw 3 cars in the ditch on the way to work that day. -I had a manager who got injured on the job and they never received worker's compensation. They did a lot to get the attention of the company, and their requests were basically just ignored. -My manager almost suffered a pay cut due to a glitch on the website that they had to use to input metrics and sales figures into. So, they basically were almost punished because of the company's screw-up, not their own.