Shady & Unfair Treatment from Management - Management had their favorites. Favorites did whatever they wanted, including taking lunches way longer than allowed or being able to show up half an hour late to their shift. New-hires and others that weren’t favorites were viewed under a microscope and being told to do things outside of the job description that no one else wanted to do, such as restock/reinventory an entire brand with no help or guidance.
Discrimination - This was an issue that was voiced by myself and multiple members of the team to HR. Nothing would change.
Poor Work/Life Balance - Our team was required to work 3 weekends out of the 4 of the month. Time off requests were often denied. The majority of our team called out sick to get days off, when most of the time they weren’t actually sick. The general consensus of our team was “Time off requests were notifications, not requests” Of course, the favorites of our manager received days off whenever, with one of the favorites being approved for an entire month off for vacation when most the team struggled with getting 2+ days off in a row.
No Room for Advancement - When I interviewed, I was promised a career path that would continuously chart upwards with promotions and pay raises. After being there for a year, I received neither of those things. Myself and others on our team requested for the opportunity to apply for a different role that had opened and was denied because of a “new company policy” that prohibited members of our team from changing to a different role because it was a revolving door. (Wonder why people were leaving so often..)
Unfair Pay Across Team - Our team was extremely close knit aside from a few outliers. We all shared our pay with each other and found out that almost everyone was being paid a different amount, despite us all having similar experience.
Being Scapegoats for Management Issues - Lower management would be the root of many issues, especially when it came to customers. Of course upper management saw this as an issue and when lower management was confronted, they would often blame it on the associates. This led to some associates receiving repercussions that were not valid or warranted.
Requirement to Mislead Clients - Our manager told us many shady things and practices and told us to pass on that information onto clients. For example, the most major one would be when clients ordered something online for in-store pickup. The Neiman Marcus website states “purchase before 2 PM for same-day pickup” which was hardly ever true. Many items that our store didn’t even carry were showing for same-day pickup. It’s impossible to have same-day pickup when we need to ship certain items from other stores. Even if we did have it in-stock, our fulfillment team was so backed up that they could hardly keep up and orders were never ready on the same day. Clients would often call and complain that it’s not ready yet, which were frustrating to receive because there’s nothing we can do about it. Customers often asked us to cancel their orders, which wasn’t even possible on our POS system. Our manager told our team to tell customers that their order will be cancelled immediately. There’s no way for us to cancel orders, so how does that make sense? We had to tell them their order was cancelled and leave sticky notes on our computer in order to remind everyone to return that customers order when it arrived. This led to returns taking up to 2 weeks, causing customers to get furious and keep calling until they saw their money return to their bank account. 80% of phone calls to our team were related to this. We had no control over any of it, but we were the ones that had to listen to customers getting loud and impatient.
