Pros
Pay and overtime is pretty nice until your district leaders cry about not giving it to you so you cant do it LOL.
Cons
GOSH. Where do I S T A R T . Altard state has to be one of the worst establishments I have ever worked for in my entire life. I have never met such fake district leaders and hire up individuals who call themselves "home office" and be so incompetent in my whole life! You order supplies and they take forever to arrive because the person in charge of accepting orders and sending out, half the time doesn't even read your emails or responds days after. I'm even having trouble understanding their position. "They" are the least of my concern. ANYWHO. In order to work for the company you must pass an assessment. If candidates don't pass the assessment, we don't interview them. A LOT OF PEOPLE DONT PASS THE ASSESMENT. MEANING SHORT STAFFED ALL THE TIME + BRAND REPS QUITTING EVERY OTHER MONTH. Eliminate the assessment, half of the hire ups wouldn't pass is anyways so why include? You ask us if we need help and you have district leaders who come and do pop ups just to sit in the back office to write small emails through the day and conduct interviews because of how low your retention rate is. Do you ever wonder why? Assistant leaders and store leaders have it the worst. Without us your position wouldn't exist. This company thrives on customer service...THEY "CLAIM"... Every month you have random people hired by a third party from the company to come rate our service. Called Voice of the Guest aka VOG aka secret shopper. If you fail below a 90%...whatever manager on duty is given a write up and any brand rep who wasn't in their section at the moment or didn't hit every point on the VOG assessment of the visit also gets a write up. 3 write ups you're out. Please make this make sense. You have 7 employees MAX working on a black Friday with hundreds of people walking into your store. How can we be expected to pass every secret shopper that comes in during busy holidays. It is nearly impossible to speak to every guest. You need an associate at all times in front , fitting rooms, floor and registers. There is only so much we can multitask. We are not robots. Sorry to say ( Some of us know who your secrete shoppers are. That's why we pass them ;) " We have actual reviews from actual guest who express how much they love our staff and customer service but that never gets looked upon. Altard State doesn't CARE about your service to the guest, they care about a passing secret shopper score. That's it!!!!!!!! That's the company!!! You pass a secret shop you get fake corny shout outs - you fail and oh uh here comes the district leaders and store managers giving us write ups.... so scary... not to mention on top of holidays being so busy and short of staff you have 400+ orders of Ship from store orders that the team needs to fulfil before the end of your shift. Company allocates hours for this so maybe one person all day could be scheduled to complete all orders. That and will never be possible. Whole team as a collective had to work for SFS because if we didn't we'd get more and more orders everyday. If we did not complete them here it come with the EMAILS. "hey team.....yadayada" SFS became then a priority but by doing that we would fail a secret shopper. The secret shopper even has an opportunity to write comments and if even if they said that they had a positive experience in the store but wasn't greeted then why still get a write up? Its a loose loose situation. This place also does markdowns every Sunday and its so stupid. Its a Christian store yet Sundays are the day we leaders and brand reps leave the store the latest. Very Safe isn't it? You will be graded on everything, there is no positive reinforcement done. Being rated one of the best places to work for is complete BS and nonsense. Altard state messes with you mentally AND physically. There is no work life balance and if you're the type to be confrontational or the type to address and speak up for issues or concerns, be prepared to be reprimanded for it. They dislike anyone who uses their voice. And here we are, speaking mine... Your turnover rate is extremely high and that speaks volumes!
