First of all, the hiring process should have shown me how frustrating this company would be. I told them my start date, which they okayed because I got hired, and they still scheduled me for days before that, calling me and asking why I wasn't in when I gave my start date from the jump. Then it seemed like an inconvenience to them to have to rearrange the schedule for me. I quickly became overwhelmed with all the tasks they give at once every shift. You're doing shipment in the fitting room, helping customers, doing go backs, going to check for sizes and sometimes having to run on the floor all the while they expect you to keep the dressing rooms neat and your shipment done at an unreasonable speed. If even a piece of clothing was left in the fitting room for a single second while you were assisting another customer, they'd yell at you and say you need to pay attention better. It made it impossible to get any task done because there were so many. Breathe for a second and you'd get yelled at for not running across the store to hound someone who's been approached 10 times already. We were always blamed for poor sales and judged for how "effective" we were because they didn't think to take into consideration these factors: different positions in the store (fitting room, cashier) affect how many sales you will get; different shifts are slower than others; people will steal your sale; some customers will lie and say no one helped them. Many times I would be running around working hard for my sales and at the end of the day the number would be so low. They'd act like it was your fault and even read each employees current sales over the earpiece for all employees to hear, which brought out the worst in those sales associates who took their job too seriously and wanted to cut down others who they saw had lower sales. Management was very rude and unhelpful but when we did something wrong, they were quick to lambaste us for doing it wrong even though their directions were unclear. They also have VERY specific ways of doing everything which made it difficult to know how to do something right since we were never instructed how to. We also weren't allowed to leave even if our shift was finished because we didn't finish our box of shipment or finish putting away the go backs, mind you that people have school and other responsibilities and make their work schedule around that. If you didn't finish your tasks (because it's nearly impossible to) before your shift ends, too bad. They seemed to not care that people had lives away from the job. Even on the many occurrences I stayed late (I mean up to a few hours later), came in early, took shifts at a moments notice, there's no reward at all. It's expected that you drop what you're doing to come work even when you're not scheduled that day because that's what a good employee ought to do. There really wasn't any work to life balance which shouldn't be the casefor a part time retail job. We would have to stay super late (I'm talking 4 am) to do floor sets instead of them hiring a visual merchandising team to do that. This was often dangerous and tedious making all the visuals by hand, not to mention way above our pay grade. Even after all the work we put in, we were seen as dispensable to the company, which is common in retail. The manager didn't even turn around to say bye to me when it was my last shift (and I left under reasonable circumstances). Also- the company is trying to be like a Hollister now, requiring employees to wear specific outfits from the store to work( as in, you can't stray from the lookbook at all). Overall, too stressful and micromanaged for a minimum wage job where the managers don't even have respect for the employees THEY hired.
