Its better than most retail jobs but its still not a great job for regular staff - Anonymous employee Mud Bay Employee Review

PTO and Attendance Policies: Combined vacation and sick hours that accrues very slowly. It really makes planning vacations tough unless you have more than enough PTO saved up in case you get sick between now and your vacation. You are given a minimum number of hours you will be scheduled per week (GFE) and you are not allowed to work any less than that even if you are willing to take unpaid days off. If you want to take a week off you need at least the same amount of PTO as your GFE. A very strict attendance policy with little wiggle room. It only takes a handful of late arrivals or call outs before you will be given a strike in the discipline system, that is unless you use your very limited PTO. Discipline Track: They use a 4 strike discipline system but what is considered a strike can be as small as a mistake or a miscommunication and many things can count as a strike. The wrong manager can and will find small things to "coach" you on and those strikes will add up quick. Too often, those who were fired, did something fairly minor but because they were on their third strike, had to be let go. The strikes are only removed after 6 months so you could quickly get to 3 strikes and have to work everyday for months worried that a simple mistake could lead to your firing. Pay: Pay is better than a good number of retail jobs but for a company that espouses "living wages" they're still not willing to set to a level that is actually livable on. Based on the MIT living wage calculator they use to determine their wage structure, they explicitly expect you to be a 2 income household. So single folk are going to have a much harder time with the pay. They make claims to be a supportive and progressive company but literally every single person I knew that had legitimate wage grievances were women, and this occurred at multiple stores throughout the company. One was even told "It is what it is" by HR when they asked why they made less than some of the newer hires. A few of these grievances were fixed but only because managers (all of whom were men in this instance) fought on their behalf. Culture: About 50% of a store's staff are leads and managers, a bit less for the larger stores. Some times it can feel like there are too many "cooks in the kitchen" so to speak. Too many of the leads aren't actually good at their job. So many issues could be dealt with if they were willing to actually lead and do things like have even slightly difficult talks with staff. Instead they often run to the manager and it becomes a bigger deal than it ever needed to be. They spend all this time taking classes on how to lead but frankly very few of them actually stood out as leaders. If you are not super outgoing the expectation to engage with everyone that enters the store, and again if they've been in the store for 5-10 minutes, will get tiresome. Overall culture of some stores has taken a considerable turn for the worse. Its really a store-by-store issue though. Even for Seattle, it is a very white workforce; you could probably count the number of people of color that you'll work with on one hand.