Vantaggi
Fun product to sell, as a store manager able to hire employees, impact sales through employee motivation, create unique visual displays, work with a lot of great people to work with and fun customers.
Svantaggi
Pier 1 made it a point to promote from outside the company and not focus on training and developing store managers to move up. It felt very stagnating. The corporate office would lavish benefits and incentives, activities, free flowing alcohol at company meetings, etc. for the home office workers and give next to zero budge for stores. Every year as store managers we would get a whopping $5 per employee for a xmas party. Employee appreciation week meant nothing for store managers and an expectation that store managers go out of their way both personally and financially to make the week special for their teams... often times scheduled during some crazy time like inventory week. The company just seems to go out of their way to not value the store teams and the managers efforts to drive sales but the store teams were the first to be blamed with lagging sales even though just about every aspect of the store sales depend upon the success or failures of the corporate distribution systems, marketing, supply chain inefficiencies, etc.