I've been here long enough to see that this company pushes all the boundaries possible to maximize revenue at the cost of its human labor.
They will staff the bare minimum yet expect stores to hit aggressive goals.
Closing shifts are late (11-11:30PM on weekdays) because they don't want to hire back of house staff so educators are expected to do that work after the store closes.
Shifts are constructed in such a way it actually discourages staff from picking up each other's shifts. You can't do a double because they'd rather let a store operate with one less person and still hope to make target than pay someone overtime.
Breaks are 10 minutes - every other retail practice I know is 15 minutes.
You are assigned trainings which is nice in theory, but you never have time to complete them because again, store is staffed at a bare minimum that you can't leave the floor; then you're penalized for not being up to date.
You will experience a lot of theft, to a point where we know who the regulars are and yet nothing is done about them. Instead of paying for staffed security, corporate will just push trainings saying how much they care about you and this is how you can respond to theft (submit a report that goes nowhere).
Managers say they care about you and want to support you, but they are just repeating the corporate kool-aid that is trickled down to them. They are repeatedly trained to prioritize the store and business first, aka making money over human empathy. If you want to pick up a shift but can only come in 30 minutes later, they refuse to adjust the shift. You're written up if you clock in a minute late. They are often not the ones who stay late for closing shifts, and rarely share in doing the grunt work educators take on. It creates a sense of "us vs. them" mentality when leaders are not empathetic and not doing work they expect only educators to perform.
Can't buy for friends/family using your discount. Sometimes there are outfit to educate promotions, but you quickly realize they just want you to buy items that aren't selling, so you can be paraded around wearing these items and show guests in the hopes that they too will buy the slow-moving inventory.
Lastly, the scheduling and time off structure heavily disadvantages part time employees and is incredibly inflexible. Schedules are posted monthly, which means time off requests are due 6 weeks out. But how often do you clearly know your "rest of your life" plans that early? Additionally you are only allocated a limited amount of time off hours per year, which again disadvantages part time employees in which this is their secondary income. And since they count Sundays as the last day of the shift, a March 2nd request that's on a Sunday, counts as a February work week, meaning you need to submit the March 2nd time off request, in December.
