Solid corporate retail environment with some caveats - Director of Planning Ralph Lauren Employee Review

-Many layoffs and reorgs, either large swaths all at once like in June 2016 with the Stefan Larsson shakeup, or stealth layoffs where (female leaders, in particular) disappear and a new crop of leadership would bring in their minions. Reorgs generally brought unnecessary hierarchy and team structure changes which caused inefficiency and double work. Women in leadership over age 50+ were dismissed at a suspicious rate. -The open office layout in the west Chelsea building is the epitome of open office hell: inconvenient location, hard to concentrate in loud environment, no privacy, tiny ratio of toilets to # of employees, comically small # of conference rooms or "phone" rooms for 400+ employees. Concrete floor & high ceilings allows the eating, chewing and talking sounds to reverberate throughout the floor. Only SVP and above have private offices. -With very few exceptions, you will be treated more favorably by management with team placement and promotions if you are 1) conventionally good looking 2) have very wealthy parents or wealthy significant other 3) went to an Ivy league university, or Duke, Villanova, et al, plus extra office politic points if you are planning a half million $ wedding and inviting RL coworkers -Small cost of living/performance raises each year - however, this is standard in NYC retail -With so many division silos, you often found yourself doing more work on unrealistic deadlines for teams other than your own, and would often be berated/mistreated by people you did not report to. In addition to being treated disrespectfully, the work was often pointless, inefficient (being forced to use different systems or hierarchies that don't speak to each other) and lead to minimal meaningful changes from a business ROI. This was very stressful and time consuming, particularly if you did not have a manager who could protect you.