Managers were hired with the understanding that they would be given their own store at the end of the training and yet an 8 hour testing day determined whether or not they would get their own store, despite the fact that they were given reviews throughout the training process. Managers given their own stores in a lot of cases were unproven managers who have no experience running anything and consistently failed reviews while overseas, but since they are good test takers, they did well on testing day. The whole process makes no sense.
The company jumped into opening their stores entirely too quickly because they were hemorrhaging money from the millions spent on training and building new stores with no incoming revenue. Facilities management is a joke and unresponsive to issues. Freezer/cooler units are European and no one here in the US knows how to properly fix them thus making them crash CONSTANTLY and making a store lose money, for which the store management staff is blamed. Supply Chain has no realistic idea of what is happening in the stores and doesn't listen to the managers when it comes to allocations; they don't take sales into consideration AT ALL. Stores are allocated unnecessary product which they don't sell and have to write off at a store level for which they then have to answer to higher ups. There are so many incompetent district managers that don't even understand how to make decisions in their personal lives let alone their district (and that's with only having to support one store), and yet, they got a $15k raise for "a job well done". The company can't pay their employees (store management and under...don't worry DMs) correctly but expect people to keep showing up to work. They opened up stores in these welfare areas with unrealistically high expectations for sales, forcing management to hire 80+ associates for which they now don't have the hours. There are no HR policies written for firing/disciplining employees so firing people is nearly impossible even when they do things that are borderline illegal. So if you're a slacker and don't enjoy showing up to your job, this is the company for you because they aren't going to fire you, you may not even get disciplined!