Where to start?? The entire place runs on the whims, tantrums and unchecked swollen ego of the CEO, Harvey Moscot. The company culture is rotted from the top down. If you're interested in working here, let me paint a picture of your future at Moscot: meetings with Harvey are agonizing. Instead of working as a team to streamline operations and big projects, advice will be ignored, fingers will be pointed, blame will be placed, you will be spoken over and purposely misunderstood. You'll probably have your jokes and ideas repeated back to you as though he came up with it. Your entire day or week can be completely turned upside down at any moment because he's decided to manufacture a problem or, more likely, disrupt your day in a frantic attempt to get ahead of some of the long standing issues that are now spiraling out of control due poor planning. Mismanagement on corporates part will inevitably become an emergency that you’re supposed to drop everything or even work longer hours to fix. Harvey is easily and strongly influenced by the last person he spoke to, so you may feel like you've had a breakthrough moment with him but his opinions cannot be rooted in anything concrete because his entire foundation is built on deep, hollow insecurity.
He's never in the shops so he runs everything based on how he's feeling and whatever his yes-men in corporate are gleaning from their little excel spreadsheets. All of corporate refuses to really listen to managers and shop employees about what happens day-to-day. They’re so incredibly sensitive to anything they perceive to be criticism that they don't even like to hear what styles and colors patients are commonly requesting to see in future collections. They get upset when you try to address long standing issues with the in-house finishing lab, which can't keep up with the volume of orders. So on top of being so busy you can’t think, it’s also your job to be quality control for the lab or else you will become the face of those mistakes when you’re dispensing progressive lenses that have been installed upside down.
Emails go unanswered, inventory replenishments are random and almost never what you need. No one does shop walk-thrus, no one answers call outs. Managers meetings just...stopped happening six months ago. Nowadays, if you aren’t telling Harvey what he wants to hear, he’s like the wizard of Oz: non-existent and funneling orders through a mouthpiece in upper management, putting someone else’s face over his dirty work. Managers are being treated like franchise owners with none of the benefits and all of the responsibility and headaches. This company thinks it's too big to fail and I assure you, it is not.
We're so busy and understaffed that we often cant pee or eat lunch and they are well aware of this and simply don't care. Our COVID protocols are at their most lax while NYC is seeing it's highest numbers of new infections due to Omicron. Employees are getting sick left and right and everyone I spoke to who came down with COVID all had the same story: when they called out, not a single person requested a negative test upon return, and they felt pressured to come back before they were feeling better. In 2021, I had to insist on keeping a maximum number of people in our tiny shop, much to the chagrin of Harvey, who would rather we pack unmasked and unvaxxed people into his shops and little "party" events. I use quotation marks because they serve expired beer from the Orchard st. cellar and MAYBE order a few pizzas, if we’re lucky. They sometimes attempt to book talent but refuse to pay for that either so it's always some random person with like 400 followers and no mutuals with local working musicians (Important to note that their charity Mobileyes is defunct and yet they still take donations for it through their website so I’m not sure why they’re so hard up for spending money). Our physical and mental health is inconsequential. Nothing matters as long as he gets out of the house to socialize, publicly noodle on his expensive guitar, and see his few "friends" in the company who still kiss the ring.
If you're salaried, you can expect them to behave as though you owe your entire life to this company. They're in desperate need of employees with actual optical knowledge but struggle finding/retaining us for many reasons. The pay is laughable and they're completely opaque when discussing bonuses, raises, goals and incentives. They will low ball you on salary but insist the sales incentives make up for it. We went all of 2020 with not one single mention of bonuses or promised lunch money and that’s when Christmas bonuses stopped as well. Two out of my three years here I did not get a Christmas bonus despite my shop consistently topping our best numbers. In 2021, monthly bonuses were beginning to be paid out, but under a murky structure that was different for all the shops, subject to change at any time, and wasn’t communicated unless you reached out directly to find out your monthly goal. I’d like to stress that their incompetence surrounding the bonuses was already an issue pre-pandemic and on top of all this cheapness, they charge their own employees 4x the cost of lenses . Anyone with optical experience knows this is not normal or at all generous. No one in the corporate offices has taken any initiative to understand optics or the industry they’re a part of, so there’s actual resentment towards employees with optical industry knowledge because we point out the mistakes, oversights, and the holes in the crumbling infrastructure. Trying to make positive change that would line up with industry standard is taken as a challenge to the CEOs ego, and we’re constantly reminded that we only serve to stroke it. Personally, I didn't get paid enough for stroking of any kind
