Vantaggi
Neiman Marcus has a completely different culture from any other retail establishment I've been a part of; they value their employees as human beings. I have never worked for a company so conscientiously respectful of work/life balance - a quality that I find particularly rare in retail. It's also the first retail company I've worked for that actively cultivated the careers of its employees as businesspeople, rather than treating sales associate positions as minimum-wage drudgery for college kids; it felt much closer to the culture of a white-collar office than a store at the mall. As a part-time employee in a department with some of the lowest price-points in the store, I was fortunate enough to have a base salary in addition to partial commission, and my base alone was well beyond minimum wage - it was actually about the same as I made when I left a supervisor position at a previous company.
Svantaggi
Unfortunately, while the kind of luxury retail experience that Neiman Marcus pioneered is an enchanting idea, it's become all but entirely obsolete. The demographic that would once upon a time make a weekly trip of shopping and a luncheon at the cafe is aging out, and Neiman is struggling to compensate and rebrand itself. While the online business does seem to be thriving, the stores themselves are feeling more and more like auxiliary warehouses for the online business.