Vantaggi
Good coworkers, nice regular customers, good health insurance. They standardized the visual merchandising for the customer and this made sense. Most of the leadership are really nice. They did stop making us sell the credit card so it felt like I could be an honest person again when helping a customer.
Svantaggi
The change in field leadership structure made it really hard to grow beyond a store manager. If you did get an area lead position, you'd probably need to relocate and it's not worth the small salary step to be running 4-5 stores. If you got the market lead position, good luck going any further because there's only TWO zone leader positions and both of those people aren't going anywhere (they are both wonderful). The quality of the clothing has really tanked. I have clothes from 5 years ago that are still in great condition, and my clothes from the last two years fall apart after a couple of washes. They also changed the bonus structure. Now the bonuses are laughable. If your store made plan your associate might get an extra $18. Not motivating to them. Or to the 1A/SM that used to get 1k and now you're getting $150. Same amount of work put into it...and just less reward. It used to be a fun company to work for, even though we knew we could make more somewhere else... we always felt appreciated. Then the trips, awards, and bonuses started to go away, and the recognition piece started to get lost. Nothing makes it worth it anymore. Also, good luck with the online ordering... or anything to do with the online store. It's a customer service nightmare and you'll get plenty of upset customers (rightfully so) coming into the store that either never received their order, or had their items canceled days after the order was placed. The technology just isn't able to keep up.