Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The company is slowly dying and has been terribly slow at adapting to change. While I was there I saw a decaying store that could not afford to be fixed. I saw hours constantly being cut in the Hourly departments, to the point where an entire floor of Softlines would sometimes have 1 associate to clean it, which is insane.
As the time went on the people left were required to work more hours and raises were not given. More work for the same money.
Add on top of that constant pressure from Corporate to cut cut cut and be more profitable it was not a good situation. I was lucky in that I worked in a very profitable department with Commission sales people, but in the end I got laid off because I was the last one in and I made by far the most. I don't hold that part against them. But I do hold how terribly they run their stores against them.
Well Gamestop expects you to sell sell sell, as another poster mentioned. If its not in your nature to do that, repetitively, and you thought the job would just be helping people find a particular game and then just stand around the rest of the time, that could lead to employment dissatisfaction rather quickly.
The others I can't comment on. I feel sadness for the Kmart brand, and Sears, it seems like a mismatched retail pair. My closest store was shut down, it was on an awkward corner for drivers and had very poor traffic. They only told the employees a few days before shut down that they were out of a job.
The store was turned into a Burlington Coat Factory which has no trouble getting customers into the plaza, awkward or not.
Another nearby Kmart was kept by Sears, and fully renovated (it was a decaying Kmart), its as nice as a Target in there now, just bought some tires there and spent my waiting time lounging in the patio furniture display. Oddly enough Sears also keeps a small tool store just down the road from the Kmart.
Target does well as its attracted a more upscale shopper with designer items. They also hire happy, intelligent people, even for the stockroom jobs, and have a company standard of helpfulness and pleasantness to the customers, and to each other. They are aware the environment is what will have customers choose possibly paying a slightly higher price for something, versus just going for cheap at Walmart.
I wonder if this includes the corporate positions within the company. My buddy worked for Enterprise R-A-C on the rental side and absolutely hated it. He was treated awful by many of the clients and management didn't really have anything to say about it other than "do what you can to make them happy". That was a nearly impossible feat in most cases. Plus, he had to wear a suit every day and clean cars in the suit for a meager $11/hr. Recently, he got into the local corporate HQ and says it is a 180 from what he was doing. He actually likes his job now, at least in comparison to what he was dealing with.
It just goes to show you that the retail side of the business might give these places a bad rep.
Don't forget the Bachelor's degree requirement. You need a Bachelor's to know how to wash a car in a suit, apparently.
The company is slowly dying and has been terribly slow at adapting to change. While I was there I saw a decaying store that could not afford to be fixed. I saw hours constantly being cut in the Hourly departments, to the point where an entire floor of Softlines would sometimes have 1 associate to clean it, which is insane.
As the time went on the people left were required to work more hours and raises were not given. More work for the same money.
Add on top of that constant pressure from Corporate to cut cut cut and be more profitable it was not a good situation. I was lucky in that I worked in a very profitable department with Commission sales people, but in the end I got laid off because I was the last one in and I made by far the most. I don't hold that part against them. But I do hold how terribly they run their stores against them.
I also currently work for Sears and it is true that Sears is a dying company. There are several reasons why Sears is dying judging from what I have seen there:
1. Sears and Kmart don't belong together. Sears probably leans more towards tools and appliances in comparison to Target and Walmart but both Kmart and Sears are basically the same type of store. They cannibalize sales from each other and it shows in their weird sales numbers. Furthermore, you have a brand problem as well (kind of like the badge engineering in the auto industry); Sears is selling Kmart branded bedding and apparel while Kmart is selling Craftsman tools and hardware. This throws people off.
2. Sears focuses too much on credit cards, warranties, and protection plans instead of selling physical products. Any non-financial company that does this is usually a poorly run company. The reasons being that Sears sells a large appliance for $500 but paid $450 from the manufacturer. Gross profit of $50.00. The warranty for the appliance sells for around $120 - $130 but only costs Sears $10 - $20 on average. Sears currently works with ****ty, er Citibank for its credit cards and I think Sears gets a kickback or royalty of some sort from Citibank. The store manager as I understand it gets a bonus each month based on how many credit apps and crap his/her store gets. It sometimes is as high as $2000/month, not exactly chump change. And for those of you who shop at Sears and get pestered for email addresses, that is mainly because Eddie Lambert and his immediate minions were originally planning on shutting down the physical Sears stores and replacing them with an online store, sort of a high tech version of the original catalog company that Sears started out as. It's possible that he may still try to do that!
3. Sears stores haven't been maintained in YEARS. A couple of months ago I was assigned to move and rearrange a light bulb display in the store and a coworker of mine told me that those light bulbs on the shelf hadn't been touched or moved since before he first started back in 2006. Yes, those light bulbs have been sitting there for at least 7 YEARS. The layers of dust and dirt on quite a bit of the merchandise leads me to believe he's right! Equipment and electronics are in poor shape, outdated or missing. When people say that Sears registers are ancient, they are probably right. The registers are at least 20+ years old and might be as old as me (31). That's also why Sears has problems with their website and their IT since they have registers designed in the pre-internet era trying to work with a website in 2013.
4. Sears has a lot of politics even by corporate standards and tends to hire a substandard workforce. Salespeople at Sears are a mixed bag; some are really good people and will go out of their way to make everyone's day a good one. On the other hand, the bad salespeople (usually the higher selling ones, ironically) tend to be people that you want to throw a box of tools at their head. I've heard salespeople cuss and swear on the sales floor, they don't help customers at the register, and they throw a lot of 'mud' and drama at each other. There is a lot of interdepartmental hostility at Sears as well; softlines blames hardlines for something, Merchandise pickup blames the sales staff, and management blames the departments for stuff that Management is supposed to handle.
There are some good people at Sears, and in my own experience I at least am able to work at my own pace, so Sears hasn't been a complete nightmare for me. However, I can see where a lot of people work at Sears and swear the whole company off afterwards. Also, I believe the one poster who talked about reviews of workplaces is right in that they have to be taken with a lot of skepticism. I have worked for companies that were rated excellent and in reality they were a nightmare to deal with. As far as Sears goes, I give them maybe 2 - 5 years before they cave in. You still have a lot of loyal customers at the place, especially out here in the prairie states.
Is there any company in america you WOULD want to work for? In the mind of a long term unemployed person, no...(truthfully, deep down).
I would like to work at REI if they paid a livable wage. I have an interview with one of Colorado top companies to work for.........and I hope I will be working there.
In other words, a bunch of customer service/retail based companies that you don't even need a college degree to work for. No surprise there...
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
