Pros
Managers and co-workers are friendly, hard-working, and team-oriented group of people. The work that I completed at Paper Source was for my team and never for the company.
Cons
Employees are abused by the company at all levels. I understand that a new CEO has been put into place, and so am hopeful that these issues will begin to be rectified because they need to be rectified soon. I am by no means a person with wild expectations for employee treatment --I've worked retail at a number of different places, have earned two degrees in my (unrelated/non-creative) field, have worked non-retail jobs too and never for pay higher than $20/hour. But speaking from the past few years of employment at Paper Source: -Managers cannot afford to take breaks during long hours because of the daily task expectations of corporate, many of which are unreasonably time-consuming creations for temporary display (cutting out elaborate paper designs, assembling dozens of tissue pom poms or rosettes, constant floor moves of products and complex signage, etc). I don't want to be an associate for a company in which I see my supervisors being abused daily by unrealistic expectations and little positive reinforcement. It lowers associate morale (or, at least, mine) because we are such a tight-knit team and want to see each other be treated well. There are 'incentives' like contests in which stores win candy, or small gift cards for pizza, etc. But there is no overtime compensation available to any managers or associates for required tasks when they go long after close. No overtime, either, for holidays, or floor-moves/inventories that could last until midnight or later. No bonus, and no commission for commission-style tasks (like selling custom print orders of $500+) and selling pricey workshop seats. -Low wages for high-energy-demand in the level of customer interaction, especially considering the baseline of knowledge (many employees have fine arts degrees) and service level required with things like custom print orders for brides/grooms, workshop instruction, display-building tasks etc. Assistant managers are paid low wages as well --just $11-12 to the associates' $9-10. I made the same amount of money working lower-responsibility retail jobs in *high-school* (sit at the register, do nothing) than I do here, and those businesses equipped themselves much larger staffs to spread tasks/ease workload for individual employees. Which brings me to the following point: -Store is consistently understaffed --rotating staff is so small that on-call workers are always being requested, and a lot of work consistently falls onto each individual person on a shift. Doesn't seem that payroll allows for enough workers in its rotation, and those workers who are there are not invested because so few hours are offered --but then little flexibility to have a second job. -Products are overpriced and occasionally culturally insensitive (teepees and 'Indians' for Thanksgiving packaged under Paper Source's own brand, sugar skulls as tchochke year-round, cards depicting nuns in heaven holding guns and alluding to the '72 virgins' trope of Islam, bow and arrow themed products, etc) with no attempt to rectify by corporate. I felt horrible/mortified having to sell and stock items that I thought were deeply offensive to the diverse community in which my Midwestern store resides. The fact that we have carried teepee table displays for 3 consecutive years, despite annual customer complaints relayed in the HindSight to corporate, indicates to me a lack of care about the customer base and region of operation. The Midwest is home to over half a million Native American-identifying people alone. Perhaps this is something the new CEO will better tend to. -Corporate directives are disorganized, unclear and typo-laden. An example of disorder: for 3 years corporate didn't even know that what it was asking us to do --clandestinely obtaining names from credit cards for registry numbers--was illegal. Totally unprofessional. -The pressure on the floor manager to make daily sales goals, which are often too high, trickles down to associates --who are sometimes asked (jokingly, and not) to purchase a few items at the end of the day to make goal. The idea that we spend our shifts selling such highly priced items (a stuffed animal for $40, for example) to wealthy customers who have the disposable income to afford our product (in fact, this is PS's consumer base) when so many of us are struggling paycheck to paycheck and returning home exhausted is deeply disappointing to me. This is not my industry/field and I have never planned for this job to be more than part-time as I pursue my other career--but for my coworkers who hope to make a living wage for the foreseeable future, I think Paper Source owes them much more.
