Pros
Good discount and steep discount at least once a month. Good discount across VFC brands; like north face for example. PTO accrual is decent. Did a company wide pay increase awhile back which was very helpful. Lax environment most of the time. Is an easy place to work for people that are still in college because it’s flexible and the hours are short. Very inclusive environment. Great team most of the time. Good customer base. Promotes from within most of the time. If you put in the work you can easily be promoted when a higher position becomes available.
Cons
Becoming like most greedy corporations. The amount of micro managing is deplorable. Making you feel like they do not trust you to do your job or that you’re incapable of doing it without them holding your hand. Had to do a lot of over communicating of task such as floorsets that we didn’t used to do which makes it feel like they don’t trust your judgement or even trust that you’re completing task. At time’s you will work with people that have an almost cult like mentality for the company. Changed benefits recently with a higher deductible; insurance is mediocre. You have to hold onto bad employees way too long because it’s nearly impossible to get fired unless you have multiple infractions within a specific amount of time. Adopted a performance based scheduling system that doesn’t allow you to give every associate a decent amount/promised upon hiring amount of hours. Basically a system that forces them to get other jobs or quit a job they enjoy because they’re not making enough money. Upper management outside of your store is not very supportive; may be different in other districts just not mine. The DM was really hard to get ahold of and very unprofessional at times. For example the store manager that left before I did was a fantastic manager; which is hard to come by; and they left for all of the same they're a. They brought our stores volume up by almost a million dollars and our store ranked as one of the top ten in the company for awhile which was basically ignored towards the end. And in the time leading up to their departure they were made out to be an incompetent outcast because the voiced their opinions. After they left our DM gossiped about them and their performance to the remaining management staff which is extremely unprofessional. Work and life balance is very challenging at times. Made to cut a lot of labor almost every week; some weeks worse than others. I’ve seen over forty hours get cut making it impossible to give even outstanding employees shifts. And when you’re made to cut that many hours and schedule so lightly that there’s not adequate coverage it puts twice the work load on the couple people that are there making even typically slow days feel incredibly stressful and chaotic. Heavy schedule monitoring and will not let you schedule after hours task in a way that works best for your store or your team. Used to have really good contests with incentives for staff and management but have changed them so heavily that it’s basically impossible for lower volume stores or stores located in smaller areas to win. Monitors social media and you can be terminated for things posted. Once Paul Van Doren sadly passed away the company completely changed. They threw all of his values out the window and became just like every other grubby corporation out there. Constant price increases and not a lot of change in quality. They say they're a people company that sells shoes; while that initially seemed to be the case it has completely changed. They show no care or appreciation for their management team or teams in general. Everyone I know that’s worked there or currently works there says the same thing and even the new store manager that was there as I left is now leaving. They have and are losing a lot of good employees because of the drastic change in how they’re running the businesses.