Pros
Free pair of glasses every year Frequent employee sales for additional pairs or family A lot of available knowledge, though sometimes you have to search for it or luck into working with expert career employees A lot of good people who like to help, to teach, to be good teammates
Cons
Constant cost-cutting leaves skeleton crew staff scrambling and stressed to meet exponentially rising expectations. My store has been slowly pared down 40% fewer hours allocated each week compared to 5 years ago, while being expected to produce an average 10% return over each previous year. Support is also cut. Execs assume that streamlined and efficient systems never have problems so don’t need expensive human backups; for example, if a job disappears at the lab, there is no direct contact with the lab any more, and you may wait weeks to go through multiple layers of indirect channels to get an answer that may or may not be useful. Heavy push to part timers to cut costs. And then management is surprised that part timers don’t have flexible schedules, and struggle to fill schedules when things happen; or that they aren’t as knowledgeable as full time employees, since working 10-15 hours a week doesn’t do much to build or keep expertise fresh. Heavy micromanaging and inconsistent expectations. Corporate has one standard, then the intermediate layers of managers add extra to make themselves look better. Your KPIs may inflate 25% from the original numbers by the time you are given your expected standard. You also get a sales goal each day, but that’s often not the “real” goal. Met goal but didn’t beat your crazy amazing numbers you happened to make on last year’s comparable day? You still failed. Meet the goal AND comp? Clearly goals were too easy: 10-15% increased goals next month and next year. KPIs are God. There’s a lot of push to strong-arm the customer into getting what improves your KPIs rather than what they need or want. You begin to feel manipulative and pushy. You start discouraging cheap or poor people from buying at all because they hurt your KPIs. Little to no career path. Corporate likes to hire outside management, usually from the retail fashion industry. If you want to get into management internally, you have to be absolutely extraordinary and usually jump through years of hoops, while watching outside hires come and go (and often training them). High turnover, both in management and hourly staff. Even the LensCrafters VP has changed three times in the last five years. And each management change comes with another squeeze to get more for less, to show that they are better than their predecessor. Too many conference calls (another way for upper managers to Show They Are Doing Something). It makes perfect sense to take managers away from their skeleton-crew store for an hour or two every couple of days for yet another mass conference call that can be summed up as “You’re not doing enough, push harder.” Recently it feels like upper management is an abusive parent looking to find failure. You made goal? But you didn’t convert enough of the exams, go write me a punishment essay on how you will do better. You converted enough exams by offering a cheap package to the poorer patients, but now your average sale dollar amount is down? Punishment essay and we’re increasing prices on that package. You did great last week and now all those customers are picking up their glasses, racking up your automated walk-in count, though half of that count already bought? Punishment essay on customer conversion. Sales are great, conversion is good, and average dollar is up? Now store managers have too many sales under their names, your sales staff must be inept or lazy (though managers take up half the allocated store hours....) You guessed it, punishment essay.