Pros
Gets you the experience other employers are looking for on your resume.
Cons
No work/life balance, No growth potential, negative company culture. They say you will get to travel to the "market" but I've been once in 7 months. If you do go, it will only be to NY. Only Buyers go to Vegas, Cali and abroad. Last minute notice for travel. Be prepared to a lot of miles on your car. And get you reimbursement two weeks after you've spent the money, which with what they are paying can be quite a sacrifice when you are trying to support a family and you've already planned your expenses for the month. You will not receive formal training and the people who do train are obviously not interested in doing the training. I never got part two of either of my training sessions. The majority of the training is done by the assistants who have enough work to do already. I have basically taught myself how to do allocations. And whenever my buyer disagrees with how I've allocated merchandise he never thinks maybe it as done that way because I am left to assume what he wants instead of him communicating with me how he wants things... Or that maybe I would have a better Idea of how he wants merchandise allocated if he included me in the buying process. Oh and if RF (Founder/CEO) calls a meeting, three things are going to happen. I will not start on time, it will be for an insane amount of time (ie: once had a meeting that was supposed to start first thing in the am and didn't finally start until 4 and we were kept there until 8p, I worked a twelve hour day and received now compensation for it), next... he will take forever to get to the point, third... he will talk in circles and you will be left thinking of all the work you could have completed in the time he wasted. I went from being an Assistant Manager to being a secretary... a position I had before I was a manager. I feel like I left my job for nothing. I left my job because I wanted to learn what goes on behind the scenes in retail, this is what I went to college for after-all. And now I am a bonafide paper pusher, my ideas are not needed, my opinions don't matter and I feel like all those power-point presentations I worked so hard gather info for in school were for nothing because none of that happens here. the company doesn't even use any type of trend forecasting service, the buyers buy what the vendors say is selling.
