Christmas Tree Shops Reviews

Demeaning management. Unprofessional upper management who discuss very unprofessional topics and use foul language with associates and coworkers. A typical assistant manager experience: Upon hire you will be told there is tons of room for advancement, which is not true unless you'd like to relocate to areas where the market is expanding such as the Carolina's or Ohio. You will be asked to work enough 6 day work weeks that it will offset the two weeks worth of vacation you are paid for after your first year until your 5th year (when you receive three weeks of vacation). You will be salaried. You will be told it is a 45 hour work week. It is typically a 60 hour work week for any manager who takes their job seriously. Do not expect a lunch break. You will need to unload 53 foot trailers floor loaded with product from back to front, top to bottom, in 100+ degrees and as you are doing so (because you are inevitably severely understaffed) you will be reprimanded for not having been on the sales floor. You will clean the restrooms yourself and will be lucky if you have cleaning staff there once a week. Yes, this includes when customers smear feces everywhere. You will not have the payroll to hire an associate to do routine cleaning so THIS WILL BE YOU. If you work hard you will be told repeatedly that they see you as a manager and just need a position to open up, and when it does you will be bypassed for a "fast tracked" manager. You will be so short staffed that you will likely open and close your building (a 14-16 hour day) if an evening manager calls out. You will flip back and forth between opening and closing and will routinely be asked to close, getting home at 9-11pm depending on store and time of year, and be required to come in by 7am the next day, often times earlier. You will be asked to drive all over to "go the extra mile" for customers and you will not be reimbursed for time or gas. You can go to new store openings, store remodels, anything ever asked on a whim because you are reliable and you will not move up in the company. More likely than not, if you are an assistant, you will work harder than your store manager.

CTS was a great model for how retail should be done. Then it was sold to Bed Bath & Beyond. That was the end of that. Payroll and associated hours and people were slashed to below bare bones levels. To the detriment of Shrink, Service, Safety and the sanity of the great people who I worked with. Both Regional and Corporate Management could care less about any of that. Bed Bath is all about limiting expenses at all costs. Even at the cost of driving a once thriving sales environment into the ground at high speed. As often happens in Retail mergers, promises were made to "not mess with success". So much for that as well. They have not comped sales basically since the merger. All the real CTS Leaders, at every level, have jumped ship. Shrink and Damages are at all time highs. Morale is at an all time low. If you are not a core or original Bed Bath associate who transferred over to CTS, you are a second class citizen. It is sad to see what has become of the Bilizekians once beloved New England Retail Treasure. Dispite what this site says, the Bilizekians left long ago. The HQ is now in Union, NJ and was never in Falmouth, MA. It was in South Yarmouth, MA.