Vantaggi
QBP is a great place to grow professionally, develop leadership skills, and get amazing insider deals on bicycle and outdoor equipment. It’s also one of the few companies where ambitious individuals can work their way up from the warehouse to management. The company prides itself on green business practices, and actively encourages employees to participate in community service. Plus, they reward you with merchandise credits for commuting to work by bike. Most departments provide employees with resources and training to develop their skills and advance their careers. If you have a passion for something, and can make a strong business case for pursuing it, you’ll get a chance to go for it. And if you have a good idea for improving efficiency and performance, it will be implemented and rewarded—especially if it helps the bottom line. The company makes genuine efforts to promote a healthy and active lifestyle. An onsite café offers healthy meal choices for a reasonable price. There are yoga, spinning, strength-training classes, and a resident massage therapist provides free relief for sore muscles. Plus a neighboring nature preserve provides year-round access to trails for biking, running and walking, cross-country skiing, and snow shoeing. If you love cycling and the outdoors, this is a wonderful place to earn a living for a few years.
Svantaggi
For decades, QBP has trumpeted a relaxed culture and sane work-life balance in lieu of competitive wages. But since waves of layoffs swept the company in 2013, management has piled work and additional hours on remaining staff. A hiring freeze remains in most departments, morale is low, and many long-time veterans are jumping ship for higher wages and better working conditions with other companies. The company paints its much vaunted “culture” as a kind of bicycle utopia; a place where hippie values fuse with profitable business practices. In reality, corporate politics are rife, radiating from Q’s secretive and cultish upper management. They regularly finger whole departments for psy-op-style purges, making even high-performing individuals run a gauntlet of unobtainable objectives. The result? High-profile firings and wage freezes for the lucky survivors. It’s lousy for morale, but great for the bottom-line—at least in the short term. Finally, with an aging demographic, the long-term outlook for the bicycle industry as a whole is uncertain. And as increasingly savvy competitors encroach in a market once dominated by QBP, it is uncertain how long they can maintain their roost as “the industry’s leading bike parts distributor.” So banking on a prosperous, long-term career in this sector is a dubious prospect.