With no regard for tenured leaders or their families the current senior leadership at Ocean State Job Lot is down right ruthless as well as just plain bad people that you do NOT want to work for! Accepting a job offer from this company will no doubt be the biggest mistake of your life as it was mine. Unfortunately I was taken in by all the fake glassdoor reviews, not realizing until I went to work there that submitting 5 star ratings and pre-scripted reviews was a mandatory function for all leadership in the company. Whenever a bad review would come out a 911 was sent out to the regional directors who in turn would crank up the pressure on both field and store level employees to offset the accurate negative reviews with fabricated positive reviews. In a small 140 store company I know of at least 20 long term field leaders that worked hard to build the company but were targeted and forced out by the newer leadership that's in over their heads trying to run a company having never done it before. The senior leadership that failed with traditional retail because it requires satisfying investors which they were incapable of doing, landed in a family business where their biggest accomplishment was misleading a few owners that are so involved in the buying portion of the business they don't realize how damaging having poor performers like the group of directors in this company is. At the regional director level you have 3 so called leaders with less job knowledge than the average assistant manager. One of them wears the title of the company's most hated person like a badge of honor and has no idea what it takes to merchandise or direct it. Another one of them may as well be a secret shopper because it's all this one does when visiting a store because giving direction on running a business is certainly out of the question. And the other one is a walking leadership meme who redirects every real question to the field because of zero job knowledge and is always the subject of the joke of the day at store level. For years promotions, and company cars have been promised to the market managers but never delivered on, only increased store counts and responsibilities. High potential Store Managers are routinely told they will become market managers but years go by and the promise is never delivered on and they are basically making the same money today as when the original promise was given years before. There is no bonus structure, just small lump sums of money given out in March to who they like, and excuses or fake documentation given to those they don't like. In other words if you're not a bobble head yes man you're not getting much of a bonus and because there's no structure there's no defense against the favoritism. . The 401K has zero match so unless you plan on working until you're 90 don't plan on a retirement. The company does do some admirable charity work and they love to advertise it. But what they don't tell you is a large percentage of the donations is funded by the customer. It's impossible to shop at an ocean state job lot without being asked to donate to a cause or pay for the associate covid 19 bonuses but that part is never publicized. So the bottom line is unless you have no other options and you need to put food on the table this is not the company for you. Your day is layered with checklist after checklist, an endless amount of emails to respond to and a workforce management program that leaves out the most important feature which is factoring in labor so store teams don't get handcuffed, which they do! If after all this you're still considering going to work for this unprofessional, bush league company, just remember the company's favorite word! " GOTCHA" as this is the epitome of a gotcha company!! Now make some popcorn, sit back and watch all the fake positive reviews start rolling in!
