The pay is awful. If you're coming in as a store associate then expect to be paid minimum wage. I found the sweet spot to be Shift Leader (sometimes called Key Holder) where you're given a little bit of extra responsibility for a decent pay increase, once you get into the salaried positions it gets especially bad. Corporate expects you to work 45-60 hours a week including weekends for 25k a year (around 12.50 hourly), and as the job slowly begins to consume your life most people quickly realize that they could be doing a lot better literally anywhere else. The only people that tend to stick around are people who can't get hired at other jobs, so store management falls to convicted felons who steal from the store and adult-children who go on power trips, both at the expense of other staff. This leads to high turnover all around, and in two years I saw the entire staff flip four or five times.
You can make commission on top of your wage at 2% of daily sales, which would actually make the pay decent if corporate didn't dangle it in front of you like a carrot on a stick. In order to make commission you have to hit a daily sales goal but this number is often set to an unattainable amount, and if you don't hit the goal then you make 0% of anything you sold making it feel like a waste of effort. There were often days when I would spend an entire shift making great sales causing the store to make double what it would normally make on an average day only to fall just shy of goal and receive no compensation for any of the hard work I put in. This lead to many of the employees becoming really demotivated to help or talk to any customers, and when they would talk to customers the emphasis would be on making a sale and upselling rather than helping the customer get what they actually need. A lot of customers walk into an adult store feeling uncomfortable from the get-go, and having a pushy salesman follow them around caused a lot of people to leave as well. I think the commission system caused the company to lose a lot more money in missed sales than it saved by not paying employees any commission.
I think my biggest complaint about corporate management was just how disconnected they were with their stores on the ground. They had ridiculous expectations for managers for what they were being paid and what they had to work with. The baseline expectation was that there was always somebody out on the floor helping customers, but managers were also responsible for receiving packages into their inventory system, weekly inventory scans, executing corporate directives (which often involved ridiculous arts and crafts projects), as well as a host of other duties that needed to be done to maintain the store. If you missed any of these tasks because you were out on the floor helping customers then corporate wasn't happy, but if you neglected customers to get these tasks done on time then corporate wasn't happy either. The obvious solution would be to delegate these tasks to other staff members, but many of these tasks could only be completed by a manager or a shift lead who were more expensive to staff, and the labor budget was often so ridiculously small that it was difficult to staff the store in a way that allowed you to complete all of these tasks without neglecting the customers entirely. I saw many managers start coming in on their day off just to complete these tasks and it was only a matter of time before they started to ask themselves if the stress was really worth it for what they were being paid before eventually resigning. The corporate directives were especially frustrating as they often required a display to be set up a certain way, have pictures of the display taken and sent to corporate, have them nitpick the display several times (like really nitpick, "please swap this product to the left side of the table and move this one to this one to the right and then take additional photos to prove that you did it"), only for them to change the display entirely and have it redone. It was a huge waste of everybody's time and I'm really convinced that time we spent moving products inches to the left and taking/sending photos could have been better spent making sales.
