To work here as a GM stressed me out so bad I had to leave for health reasons. Literally.
1. You are overworked because they count a salaried position towards the daily labor allowance. You are constantly understaffed and have little to no time to complete administrative tasks. This is by far the absolute worst thing about working here.
2. Job security is constantly being threatened. The threats of “write ups” are leveled against you daily, often times for things you have little to no control over.
3. The OS and POS systems being used by them are plagued with glitches, bugs and errors. Invoices and credits mishandled or unprocessed. Supply chain issues are daily problems.
4. Training policies and procedures changing so often that it creates confusion and chaos. Lack of communication and cohesion exacerbates the problems.
5. Corporate marketing severely lacks. A GM gets little to no help in growing sales at the store level. Instead the GM is tasked with what a marketing team should be doing for them.
6. Recruiting and hiring new employees is an onboarding nightmare. The process is confusing, overly complicated and often requires the assistance of someone in IT to help fix things.
7. Last but not least…when you join Potbelly you’re also joining what can only be described as a “SMG Survey Cult”. Upper management is absolutely obsessed with survey scores and results. Your bonus (if you actually ever get one) is tied to your store’s survey scores. They also threaten your job daily over these scores. Maintaining this score is extremely difficult without cheating, which by the way, most GMs have resorted to. The scoring system is rigged for failure. Upper management have this delusional mindset that you have complete control of your results. It’s a fact that customer surveys are random, biased and subjective. Yet Potbelly’s entire existence seems to be dedicated to this. Obviously customer satisfaction and feedback is important. Potbelly takes it to an entirely extreme level I’ve never experienced before in my 30 years in this industry.
In conclusion, being overworked, understaffed, underpaid while dealing with broken systems and micromanaged to death while having your job threatened constantly is stressful. So much so that I had to walk away due to the stress. Literally hospitalized for panic attacks.
