Great product, poor treatment of employees - Anonymous employee Rosetta Stone Employee Review

There is no effort on the part of the larger company to give credit where credit is due. The stores act as a public face of the company, we are instructed to capture emails and build relationships with the average consumer and then are actively undercut when it comes time to sell to those people that we worked with. The email capture (which we were told was to be for us to contact our customers) has been used to send those same customers promotional deals that could not be matched at the store level, so our customers buy online and the store doesn't even get a pat on the head for generating that lead. Considering that we generally have to dispel notions of this product as a "gimmick" due to an incredibly poor marketing system of late night infomercials, watching the company take our customers away while being pressured to "sell, sell, sell" is, at best, confusing and upsetting. In this same vein, there have been quiet moves within the company to take away our earning potential and avoid paying the commissions that the managers are required to emphasize while recruiting talent. Until very recently, you got hired at minimum wage plus 5-12% commission depending on what you sold. We still managed to build teams of people that were devoted to the product and to the selling of it, even on such low pay but those people and their devotion to their jobs are drifting away for work that is not as rewarding but actually allows them to eat. The pressure of current upper management that sales associates be "accountable" for their sales numbers is condescending at best when one considers that the average sales associate CANNOT SURVIVE without making sales beyond the projected sales requirements. Hearing the word "accountability" in this situation from people that have never been on the sales floor and never tried to pay their bills on what the managers are being paid, much less the associates, is beyond disheartening. Little to no value is placed on actual job performance unless it a)involves making astronomical sales, or b)involves exactly parroting current upper management philosophy even if that philosophy is to the active detriment of the employee in question. A recent "restructuring" of the kiosk program found effective managers that took areas that were floundering due to lack of leadership and poor communication from the parent company and got them not only functional but profitable being told that regardless of what they had actually achieved, their position was pointless, and they were worthless. They were all demoted without even having the last 6 months of work assessed. Regional trainers that have actively contributed to the success of locations across the country were fired, again without any regard for the quality of their work. Many of these managers attempted to apply for positions that remained that would allow them to retain some semblance of their previous responsibilities and they were all but laughed out of the interviews if they were even interviewed at all. When this restructuring, which was only known about because of an error while using the internal email system, began kicking up discontent, store employees were told to do as we were instructed, regardless of any experience we previously had with the company. Many of us have been with this company for 5 years or more, but we have been ignored and belittled.