In Uwajimaya's defense, the problems that plague this store are problems you would likely find in most dead-end jobs at retail stores. However it doesnt excuse the way they treat employees.
I'll start with what I actually previously listed as a pro: the "discounts." I put those in quotations because the discounts are laughably bad and are actually mitigated and made completely obsolete by certain store policies. The discount is 10% off grocery items and 20% off gift items. I'm not a complete idiot when it comes to business, I know that the company needs to make a profit off the dreadful margins that grocery stores make, but considering how expensive most of the products are, you'd think they could afford to give their employees a little more than 10%. What adds insult to injury, however, is that this 10% does not apply to items that are on sale, even if you would have saved more from the discount than from the sale price.
A real-life example that happened to me: The brand of green tea ice cream that I like can only be bought at uwajimaya as far as I know, and normally costs $10.99 for a tub. One week, the product goes on sale for $10.19, an eighty cent difference. Ignoring how completely absurd and worthless of a sale this is, in a situation where I would have saved a little over a dollar with my employee discount, I instead can only save $0.80 because of this policy. This probably comes off as whining on my part because it's only a 30 cent delta; but my point is that this should never happen. To make matters worse, it seems like half the store is always "on-sale", meaning that the employee discount cannot be used on half the store's merchandise at any given time.
My second and main gripe is with the HR and upper level management; they simply do not care, and are simultaneously incompetent. Part of this is because most of the higher level positions at corporate are occupied by close family members, even if they have seemingly no experience. When the cashiers/operations department had meetings, half of our agenda for the meeting was constructed of things HR wanted us to know/do, and many times it was clear that they had no idea what was happening in their own stores. HR isn't something I expect to be overly generous and kind to employees, but I at least expect them to know what they're doing. They blame the high turn-over rate of employees on the respective store managers even though all the stupid policies that encourage employees to leave are constructed by corporate and NOT the store managers.
