Pros
Great nonproft charity program, free glasses after a year of employment, superbly discounted eye exam, on-the-job training for new employees, spiffs if your store exceeds sales goals, you learn a lot about eyewear, single vision lenses and their options, bifocal, progressive, and trifocal lenses and their options, as well as prescriptions, insurance and overall eye health and how important it is to take care of your eyes (especially against the sun and glare), which is great if you've ever been passively curious about such things. Employee discount on frames and lenses is also great and is better than the store sales and is better than most vision care insurances (then again, if you have great vision care insurance, you probably have no need to also be working at a LensCrafters). The employees really do care about your vision health and want you to see the best that you are able, and that's the best quality that I can find. After one year of employment, you have the option to submit an application to OneSight, their nonprofit organisation, to do a short stint doing the fantastic work that they do.
Cons
You have two different sales goals: the projected sales goal and the stretch sales goal. The stretch sales goal is the goal that the stores focus on and is often unrealistic. Management goes with an aggressive technique in selling in order to meet said goals which more often than not makes potential customers uncomfortable. There is constant "coaching" if you do not meet the sales goal that was assigned to you by management or if you happen to let the potential customer browse by themselves for more than five minutes, and this coaching is most likely to happen during any time that is not LensCrafters' biggest sale of the year, which happens twice a year. When the company is not having their biggest sale of the year, yours and every other part-time employees hours may be cut drastically; however during the hour cuts the company will still put out a help-wanted ad which is insulting. The store manager typically always has 38-40 hours a week, the other full-time retail employees such as ABO certified opticians and assistant manager usually have up to 36 hours a week, where as part time employees are lucky to get more than 20 hours a week. The company also makes an effort to only have 3 full-tme retail employees, so everybody else is part time, and again, are always cutting hours despite also attempting to hire new employees. If business is slow, or rather if sales are low, expect to be sent home early often. The training provided on the job is also best described as a crash-course. It's like being taught only basic maths in class and then being expected to solve advanced mathematics on your exam. The system that you use to go through a sale, perform digital measurements, update prescriptions, is a disorganised mess when it comes to choosing lens options (several options that LensCrafters no longer has are still in the system and instead of having the options removed, they place a drop down menu telling you "DO NOT USE"), the system crashes frequently and takes a minute and a half to load up again, and while this doesn't sound like a lot of time, it's annoying, is time wasted in what would otherwise be a smooth experience for the patient and the employee, and makes you look stupid. This system is planned to be replaced in December of 2015 and will instead be on the iPads that every retail employee has attached to their waist, and is hopefully better. You also do not receive commission, but instead "spiffs" that are rewarded not based on personal performance but on overall store performance, so basically if your store exceeds its projected sales goal. This is also annoying as during interviews, the manager and assistant manager will tell you that it is an hourly job with commission; you don't learn until after you're hired that by "commission" they mean "spiffs" that are appallingly low and only add up if your store routinely exceeds sales goals.