Pros
Flexible hours for the part-time workers. District managers try to offer incentives to get employees motivated. They changed the employee discount a few months back. It is now 30% off any item in the store. The employee discount can be used on top of sale prices.
Cons
I read the reviews on this website before I applied and I thought that there would be some truth, but a lot of what other associates have stated in previous comments hold a lot of truth in daily work at Payless. Payless is all about maintaining #s and is very much a "sales" position. Every day you are given certain #s that you are required to meet. The #s that are calculated are for conversion, # of items sold per transaction (UPT), and sales. The numbers are force fed to all employees on a daily basis and employees are required to call their district manager at the end of every shift with their #s. If an associate doesn't make any one of their #s then they have to explain what they did wrong and how they will fix it. We used to have weekly calls for the bottom 2 smiles leaders per store. In many stores there are only 5 or 6 associates so even if you made your goals, but you were in the bottom for that week, you were required to sit on a conference call of public shaming where you had to explain what led to your poor #s. It was a pretty awful experience. Luckily they have minimized the daily shameing, but they still come in daily from the district managers through the daily mail. Your store could do well on all #s for the week and have 1 bad day and then district managers accuse associates of not caring about the store. There is no such thing as a bad day. If there is a bad day in #s, it is believed that it is a result of associates lack of care for the customers. An example of the comments that have been received was using an analogy stating that if you had people on the canoe that weren't rowing then the management should pull the canoe over and let them off the boat. This note was sent in the daily mail for all associates to read and reiterated numerous times. As far as training goes, they have training videos, but hands on training is very minimal. Upon starting working there is a lot more work to do then one would imagine when thinking of a working for a shoe store and that is mainly a result of too few employees to do the work assigned. The stores are given very little payroll for locations to function properly and customers to be able to get the level of service that should be strived to achieve. The max amount of people that we have on the clock are 2 associates. Many times if you work in the morning, you are working by yourself for the first 3-5 hours. Due to the lack of payroll hours, many associates are not trained properly. We are supposed to do weekly 2 hour coachings with each associate, however due to being short staffed, training often doesn't happen at all. When coachings do occur, they are continuously interrupted resulting in none of the information sticking with the associates. There is extremely high turn over in the company. Currently 12 out of the 20 something stores in my district do not have managers due to employees quitting. In addition, many of those stores are also hurting for new associates. As a result of minimal payroll, employees are lacking proper training or the ability to become good at sales (they are penalized for poor #s, but not trained on how), there are a lot of tasks with very little time to get it done with the amount of people working. Stores are often behind in tasks making stores look messy and unkept. There are a lot of customers that don't get to experience the company's structured "customer journey" because there are not enough associates on duty. I feel bad for the customer's because they don't get the experience they should have when they walk into a store. One thing that was interesting was that the company doesn't provide extra payroll for Christmas shoppers. I've worked many hours this holiday season as the only employee on shift for 3-5 hours at a time. Often times having 10-15 customers in the store at a time with many needing their adorable little one's feet measured or needing help finding a shoe that is on top of the racks. Even though I am hustling to get to every one I feel terrible for the customers. The responses from customers are either complaints due to not being able to get any help because we are stuck with a long line at the register by ourselves or sadness for the associates working for themselves. I am very much a service oriented person and move very quickly, but the quality of service that Payless stands for is not able to be portrayed without staffing levels fulfilled. Ensuring that there are 2 people on staff at all times would make customers so much more happier because there would always be someone to assist them, associates would be able to be trained properly providing increased performance, and job satisfaction, and customer retention would be higher.