Pros
For management, compensation and benefits are great (above-average pay for retail, 40% discount on regular-priced items, good health benefits), although what you earn can vary greatly depending on store volume. Corporate generally communicates well, if quite excessively at times. You will have great tools and resources to learn your job, and district teams are usually great at stepping in to help train you. If you have a friendly, solid clientele, selling on the sales floor can be fun and rewarding. Visits from corporate teams are often comfortable, and they’re usually open to honest feedback.
Cons
Lenient policies - This seems great when it gives you wiggle room to avoid negative customer situations (they can pretty much do anything they want because of the “100% guarantee” customer service policy and you don’t have to fight them); however, that can turn right around when HR wants to use something to get rid of you. In other words, policies are stated but not really adhered to in discipline. Example: Customers aren’t supposed to use more than one coupon in a transaction, but you are always encouraged to “do what’s right for the customer”. So they’ll allow it in several cases until the one time they don’t. It gives you a false sense of security. I’ve seen several seasoned managers terminated for very minor reasons so that younger, less-qualified people can take a smaller paycheck for the same job. The company also seems to be going through an identity crisis lately. It doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore. The Home Fragrance portion of their business has expanded exponentially (as evidenced by remodeled stores where White Barn now takes up half the real estate space), while Body Care (what used to be their bread and butter) has waned in the public interest. You don’t have to do anything to sell the candles, but you have to practically force body care demos on people to compensate for this shift. And nearly all the new attempts at body care are secondary riffs on the latest trends. You used to walk in other stores and see BBW fragrance knockoffs - now it’s the other way around. They’re trying desperately to find some relevance in the market, and the selling behaviors they force on you to make that happen are often unnatural and uncomfortable. Work-life balance isn’t great, but it’s retail. You know you’re gonna lose your weekends. The only thing out of the ordinary is that corporate will often change floorset dates on a whim and often at the last minute, leaving you with little time to change your plans or prep your new schedule. Communication from higher up is prevalent, BUT it’s not in a centralized location. For any given floorset, for example, you can receive info through email, in the weekly newsletter, on their internet community system, or in the physical pack-up they send you. This can make it very hard to keep up with information or remember where you read something.
