A frustrating and unfulfilling experience - Certified Custom Framer Michaels Employee Review

I was made to watch numerous videos on my first day... one of which was the CEO of Michaels telling me how vital & important the retail employees were to the company. Unfortunately almost nothing about my experience there backed that claim up. Meager hours, uneven scheduling, minimum wages with paltry yearly raises, little to no training in most aspects of the store, constant rule changes and revisions, unrealistic work demands... none of it adds up to an employee feeling even remotely valued. Payroll hours are given (and taken away) dependent on how the store performed the previous week. So if sales are down for any reason, hours are slashed to ridiculously low levels which results in a vicious cycle: not enough employees to help customers find items on the sales floor, not enough cashiers to keep checkout lines short, and not enough framers to get their orders done correctly and on-time results in unhappy, angry customers and yet another meager sales week... which causes more hours to be cut the following week which hinders more sales; and so on. I worked in the frame department and was constantly amazed at how badly it was run. The little training that is given to framers is almost entirely focused on how to sell -- and especially up-sell -- to customers. The company doesn't seem to understand (or care) that picking out pretty mats and frames is barely only half of the trade... a framer also needs to know how to correctly handle and frame various types of art so that they're protected and preserved. Some framers, like me, already had lots of experience in framing before being hired at Michaels, so the lack of education wasn't as big a deal. But others were put in the shop and expected to handle expensive and/or highly sentimental pieces of art with mere hours of rudimentary training; and since payroll hours are constantly slashed, framers work solo 95% of the time, so there is nobody for them to ask how things should be done properly. I feel extremely badly for customers who are lulled into a false sense of security and trust by the white gloves the framers wear at the sales counter, and the misleading title of "Certified Framer" that's given to pretty much anyone who can put three mat samples together for a customer and figure out the framing software. Again, not ALL framers are inexperienced and untrained, but a shocking amount have absolutely no clue... and the customers are paying top dollar regardless (and unknowing) of the gamble of whether or not the person framing their art actually knows what he or she is doing. Another downside of the framing department was the constant barrage of unhappy customers because of late or shoddily-done jobs due to understaffing and lack of training. Michaels doesn't seem to realize that the cornerstone of a successful business is the repeat customer... and good word-of-mouth is infinitely better advertising than weekly coupons off insanely inflated prices. The best way to get an end product that exceeds expectations and is on-time is to have a genuinely knowledgeable staff and enough time/man-power to get the jobs done right. As I stated earlier, framers are almost always working alone; so even when overwhelmed with orders to be done, we were constantly pulled out of the shop to not only help new framing customers, but also jump on a register, take phone calls, help customers who couldn't find a single employee on the sales floor, sweep floors, do "go-backs" (returning items left at registers and/or all over the sales floor to their proper places), bring out and take in the ridiculous and tacky amount of sale- and dollar-items outside the store, help with closing procedures, plus a variety of other distractions which kept us from doing our actual jobs effectively. Overall it was an extremely negative and frustrating experience. If you're someone who takes a retail job with a grain of salt, then you'd probably be fine. If you're someone like me who, even when being paid a fraction of what you're worth STILL wants to excel and do the best job possible, that vigor will be drained out of you soon after employment with Michaels.