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<p>Friend’s D got a job working retail at a teen store in the mall and she found it very difficult to make any money because of the things posters have highlighted: not many scheduled hours, being sent home early from work if it’s slow, being “on call” so she couldn’t get another part time job. Factor in gas costs and having to buy the store’s clothes to look the part–the job did not work out. </p>
<p>It seems like those jobs would only work for someone who only needs pin money…</p>
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<p>Considering the worker is considering the shareholder - the long-term shareholder that is.</p>
<p>Your high-frequency trading types probably don’t hold the shares long enough to consider that there are workers.</p>
<p>I wondered if you meant that literally, about owning retail stores, BCeagle. Thanks for clarifying.</p>
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<p>They were listed on the 100 Best Companies to Work For by Fortune Magazine.</p>
<p>I wonder if some of the behavior observed here is done by local management and not necessarily company policy.</p>
<p>Another similarity between REI, Nordstrom and other retailers is that REI and Nordstrom have very generous return policies. </p>
<p>The flip side of all this is that their prices are higher. So I can see their business model working for high-end goods but not working in grocery stores or cut-rate retailers.</p>
<p>My Dd took a job during a holiday season with Bath and Body Works, but she already had another part-time job where she was able to plan her schedule. When she discovered that the majority of her B&BW hours were “on-call”, she quit because she spent more time waiting at home for the phone to ring than she spent on the floor. Sometimes she’d call in, and they would tell her they “might” need her in an hour or so, and to call back. She couldn’t believe how the other employees just put up with it. Only the managers had regular hours, and there were very few of them.
When she left, and explained why (she couldn’t be “on-call” 24/7), they told her that if she quit before the season was over, she wouldn’t be able to get a recommendation from them to work in the future. She’d be put in the “not able to rehire” bin. Needless to say, that soured her for any retail in the future, so there was no incentive to stay on anyway.
It made me sad, as I worked for Sears my last years of HS and all through college. I had regular hours, made friends with employees, bosses, and really enjoyed my work. I am amazed how horrible many retailers treat their employees now. I honestly couldn’t believe what my Dd was telling me about the “on -call” situation until I saw it myself when she was home for the holidays.</p>
<p>^^ I love REI and Nordstrom. Now I have another reason to shop there. I’d rather spend a few more bucks to frequent a store that treats it’s employees like human beings. Of course, the quality is there, too.</p>
<p>I may start asking at retail chains if they have this practice. If they do, I’ll go elsewhere.</p>
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<p>I think this is what most parents call motivation to complete your degree. </p>
<p>I didn’t have these issues as I worked for the state government while in college. </p>
<p>But you probably wouldn’t want to wash dishes or clean cafeteria trays.</p>
<p>As a generalization, in retail if it is a slow day, there isn’t a lot of work to do since most retail jobs are somehow involved in helping the customers walking in the store today.</p>
<p>If the company pays people to show up and do little, prices go up because of increased labor cost (non-trivial).</p>
<p>As a customer, do you to pay more so staff can sit around and not do much on slow days? Or would you rather pay less knowing that staff that is not needed is sent home or shifts are cancelled.</p>
<p>It can be the pits. It’s also a good reason to get a degree and get out of retail.</p>
<p>This seems like a good issue for:</p>
<p>Investigative reporting
Attorney General complaints
Contacting politicians</p>
<p>These companies aren’t doing anything illegal but it can take a little light to improve corporate practices.</p>
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<p>I’d like a company that managed efficiently enough so that they had other things to do on slow days and busy days. I try to find companies like that to invest in and shop at.</p>
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<p>Sometimes the former doesn’t imply the latter.</p>
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<p>Government jobs are great if you can get them. And no problem washing dishes- as long as you don’t have to wait by the phone for 6 hours for the privilege of working for 2 hours at minimum wage. It’s the unpredictable hours that makes it bad for students(or anyone) who has any other commitment in their life.</p>
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<p>But it’s a vicious circle…business is slow, so they send everyone but one or two people home…so then there is no one to open the dressing rooms or a long line develops at the checkout, so people shop elsewhere…</p>
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<p>Exactly! Yes, when I worked in the hospital kitchen, I complained to my parents about how gross it was to work in the dish room…but I was getting 40 hours a week all summer at 50 cents an hour above minimum wage. That is SO much better than having someone willing to work, needing to work, getting 4-8 hours a week now.</p>
<p>I used to have a job as a stock boy when I was 14. The job included:</p>
<p>Vacuuming
Stocking
Changing the ceiling lights
Cleaning toilets and anything else
Carrying seasonal stuff to the stock room</p>
<p>Basically a ton of stuff unrelated to customer interaction. I had scheduled hours and enjoyed the job - many might have considered it menial but there was a variety of stuff to do and I learned a bit about how businesses operated.</p>
<p>Would I wash dishes or clean trays? Of course. You do what you have to. (I have washed dishes but it was for volunteer work).</p>
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<p>There’s a grocery chain that we shop at that hires huge numbers of high-school and older kids for the usual retail work. They manage traffic with sales. They send out an eight-page flyer with specials on them to bring in customers - I assume that they have historical data for holidays and seasonality and can make predictions on normal turnout and crank up the sales items when they need more shoppers and reduce the number of sale items when they know that they will have a lot of shoppers.</p>
<p>Here is another very tricky practice that I’m sure some lawyer at Corporate is proud of: The grocery store used to let college kids return for work in the summer without having to be rehired. They stopped that and now if you want to work again you have to fill out another online employment application. Here’s the trick: The computer automatically puts in the “no” pile everyone who anwers the “have you ever worked for [name of company] before?” question with “yes.” They tell you “Make sure you answer ‘no’ or you can’t get hired back.”</p>
<p>So…that means that everyone who worked at the company in the past and came back, including the college students who work over the summer, has lied on their application. They have this huge pool of employees where they know, if the employee ever raises an issue, they can prove that they lied on their application.</p>
<p>Missypie, those stories are awful. I remember when we talked about that horrible test your son had to pass in order to even get that job.</p>
<p>My kids’ biggest complaint about retail was having to go into the stores to get their hours. They couldn’t call because no one was willing to go back and check the schedule.
One day, my son was wearing a shirt he’d purchased at the store, and the manager asked, “Isn’t that last year’s shirt?”, like it was too outdated to be worn. Another time, the manager approached him and said, “That guy over there just shoplifted. Go check his bag.” Excuse me, but he was the manager. Another time, when my son couldn’t work his shift, he called a fellow employee who was one of the 90 names listed as current employes (in a store that never has more than 4 people on a shift). The kid was thrilled to pick up the hours. The manager’s response was, “Oh no, you didn’t call him! We don’t really want him working here anymore.”</p>
<p>The last two years, my son has been working in a hospital. He is on call one or two days each month. He gets paid an hourly wage when he is on call and should he get called in, they pay a car allowance and time and a half.</p>
<p>It can be the pits. It’s also a good reason to get a degree and get out of retail.</p>
<p>Well that sounds good, but many working retail have degrees.</p>
<p>The salesclerks at the neighborhood shoe store for example have degrees from Whitman, UCSC and UW.</p>
<p>My daughter had one of these jobs last summer & it started with a few hours and rapidly went to nothing.
When I first graduated from college I worked for a large bank here. Managers were the only ones who worked full time. The rest of us were kept below 40 hours so they didn’t have to pay us benefits, so this practice is nothing new. If things were slow, they’d send people home w/o pay.
Nordstrom is fine, but they pay solely on commission. SAs can start pay periods hundreds of dollars in the hole if customers return items - returns are deducted from pay. At least they don’t require you to wear expensive clothing, but it does have to be in season.</p>