Pros
-Industry wage for senior store leadership positions.
Cons
The field and senior leadership in this organization are completely out of touch with the stores. There is no strategy and upper leadership is flying blind most of the time. They have been drinking the Koolaid for so long that they wholeheartedly believe in their own nonsense. To be fair, the retail landscape is a challenging one and many organizations believe that the only way to survive is by overworking their employees and selling inferior quality/design products at a discounted price. Look at how well this strategy is working for companies like Forever 21, Gap Inc, Lowes and etc. DSW is the poster child of this new approach. As a store manager you can forget about strategizing, planning, and focusing on employee development. This is a multi billion dollar organization that hasn’t even bothered to create a standardized employee orientation or a training program. New hires are expected to do their onboarding (2-3 hours) online at home in their own time. Employees who don’t complete the online reading will simply not get scheduled. Who needs to ensure proper training when you can get free labour. Store managers are salaried work horses. When they are not running around putting out fires they are busy trying to execute the poorly thought out/ reactive directions of the executive team. These are large stores and a 5M store will be funded 300-350 total hours per week to operate. These hours include receiving/processing shipments, web fulfillment, markdowns, and management hours. Contrary to what many people believe, these are not self serve stores. You are expected to fully serve each and every customer. Upper leadership thinks they are brilliant for coming up with this novel idea: Place every shoe on the sales floor, don’t allocate sufficient payroll but demand clean, well merchandised stores that offer the best in customer service. This is akin to a coach demanding that every possession leads to a touchdown simply because they said so. Given that this is a impossible mandate their only way to stand out is to offer cheap discounted products which attract the bottom of the barrel customer. Some examples of their service standards are harassing the customer the minute they enter the store by offering them a mesh bag (which most customers drop in an aisle) or announcing on the headset every time an employee greets a customer. If you exercise any managerial courage to try to address some of these issues you will be labelled as a complainer. They like to use cliche words like “growth mindset” to refer to those leaders who do as they’re told without using good judgement. These behaviours lead to a work environment that can’t keep any high caliber employees. Their stores only attract people with substandard skills that rather do as they’re told instead of doing what’s right. Take all these reviews with a grain of salt. Ask the right questions during the interview process. If you do you will very quickly see huge red flags.
