Macy's reviews

Cons of men's shoes: A lot of the time we did not have enough coverage to help all the customers, so some customers waited a really long time to be helped. Also you were by yourself on most weekday & Sunday evenings which means you had to close by yourself. Sometimes that is nice but sometimes you have a lot to do and you get out late. Cons of fine jewelry: Lots of cons here but the two biggest ones are very high sales goals and constant pressure from store management--not just from your own manager but the store manager as well, which is worse. It's worse because your manager in FJ will help you improve and get better at your job (usually) but the store manager just demands results from everyone and in turn makes your manager ride you harder. The store manager is especially hard on FJ because FJ, Cosmetics, and Women's Shoes are the highest-selling departments, I think in that order. The sales goals I found to be very high and consistently difficult to meet. As a young male working in fine jewelry, I felt as though I was not as convincing in selling jewelry as were the middle-aged women that comprised most of the department, most of whom had jewelry collections of their own. I felt more convincing selling fine watches, but the inventory was smaller and while the $150 - $250 ones were pretty easy sales, the high end ones were very difficult to sell and not many people were seriously interested. Plus, most of them did not benefit from Macy's credit card front-end discounts, and were coupon-ineligible, because of their brands' agreements with Macy's (Gucci, Movado, etc.) which meant the price was higher. There was a big emphasis on "pre-sales", which is where you give the customer the sale price for an upcoming sale (and most sales are on weekends and especially on holidays) but they cannot take the piece home with them until the sale begins, at which point they have to come pick it up. The logic behind this is that when they come in to pick up their purchase, they will look around and buy additional items. Pre-sales were difficult however because they could be complicated to explain and some customers would just give you a confused stare... A lot of times they will not go for it and say they will come back when the sale starts and buy then, but they of course don't come back, or they do and someone else sells to them. Pre-sales are a big deal if the jewelry department is not in an actual sale. Another problem I encountered was that the FJ/FW associates were consistently called upon to fit/size watch bands for customers who just bought them. If you are doing this for a customer you just sold a watch to, it is expected, but the training on watch sizing was extremely inconsistent, so only a few people knew how to do it and they therefore ended up sizing watches for everyone else while those other associates got to get back out on the floor and get more sales. I sized a billion watches for fashion watches as well (cheaper but somewhat nice watches, Diesel, Armani Exchange, Lacoste, etc.) which is an entirely different department. Some of those watches have ceramic bands and must be sized carefully and take a looong time, which is more sales you miss. Cons of men's dress furnishings: Obviously the first is that the pay is lower here. The sales goals can be a little difficult to meet, even with the occasional sale you score from a wandering customer who needs to be rung up, as discussed in the Pro's section. During down times your manager will make you go through all the glass dress shirt cubes and arrange them all by order of shirt size, which totally sucks the life out of you. Worse yet, they will make you size bins/boxes of clearance dress shirts, which are always a mess and will become a mess as soon as you turn around again.

The cons were poor management, for the most part the shoe associates were pretty independent & Macy's allowed us to have the power to handle a lot of customers' issues on our own & told us to side with them. However in those instances when you really needed a manager as a customer was demanding one they were often times nowhere to be found b/c every Tues & Thurs every manager in the store was in a mandatory 4 hr meeting during peak times. Furthermore in my dept, when certain managers were available they would run away or try to blow you off when you needed them. Also favoritism was widespread and at times nauseating. The major con was when our store cut our commission down to 7% because they hired shoe expeditors. Instead of sales associates going to the stockroom to get the customers' shoes we were banned, we could only scan their shoe while an expeditor grabbed it for us. When they told us about the new system management lied through their teeth. They told us it would be faster, we could help more customers, we'd make more money, blah blah blah. In reality they hired way more sales associates than ever & we made less money b/c everyone was always on the selling floor & for some reason they hired few expeditors, which slowed down service tremendously b/c 3 or 4 people couldn't handle the demand of 20+ sales associates ordering 2 or 3 shoes at once. Sometimes customers would wait up to ten min for one single shoe that a sales associate could have easily gone to get in one minute but if he dared to go into the stock room to give good customer service & assure a sale, a manager would often be waiting to yell at him. Also a really bad downside were sales days when clearance shoes were marked down to 75%, you'd have about 20 people in your face everywhere you turned the whole day asking for mates to $15-$25 shoes on average, and some of these people would still want other deals and hook-ups. So draining.