A Complete Nightmare - Store Manager Windsor Fashions Employee Review

The pay is so far below what others in the market offer that it’s next to impossible to hire anyone with previous skill experience or talent. When I was hired as a store manager my payrate took weeks for approval, and it’s still not on par with other similar retail businesses, and I suspect the only reason it was approved was because I am an extremely experienced and successful business manager and trainer and they desperately needed to have someone with my experience in the district. 90% of your staff will be minors or 18-20 year olds that take this as a first job. Your “management team” will end up being any of the entry level part time associates that stuck around long enough (”long enough” seems to be less than a 6 month average) to find themselves in a position that the only way to have the business function is to promote them and give them keys. They will proceed to call off whenever they want for whatever reason they want with no regard for any of their coworkers - and you’re stuck with that as you cannot find anyone that is experienced and reliable for the pay that they offer. As a store manager you will be expected to work your store open-close alone. I worked over half of a weekend by myself because despite the fact that I have a “fully staffed support management team” no one is willing to even entertain the idea of helping out when someone has a death in the family or someone has a 102 degree fever. I was alone in a store for over 11 hours on a weekend between Friday and Saturday with huge gaps of time in which I had no opportunity to use the restroom or even sit down because there was no point that I could feasibly close the doors for 5 minutes as my store was full with customers. I was berated by customers, and my store was completely trashed as it is impossible to effectively run a sales floor like that alone. All of this had been expressed to my superior and while I don’t think field management are bad people, they are basically in the same boat as the stores and don’t really have any ability to help you as the company set up their districts to cover an area of 5 hour travel distance which isn’t a feasible area for anyone to oversee effectively without their own support management, which they don’t have. Do not - I repeat DO NOT try to work here. One of their “values” is ‘do more with less.’ They literally tell you on day one that one of their core values is for you to over work yourself. They also make you memorize and recite these values to management before you are allowed to carry keys, which is honestly just bizarre. The rest of the business, when it can function, is set up like time froze in 2003. They pride themselves on micromanagement, every tool you have to work with is convoluted and extremely outdated. You fail an audit if your part time assistants don’t know all the answers to whatever pop quiz is involved with a visit. If they can’t tell your boss things like the store’s exact shrink percent and dollar amount when they were never qualified to be put into a managerial position to begin with - you don’t pass, which only comes back on the store manager. There is also no diversity and inclusion training, and I overheard comments about the fact that I put my pronouns in my email signature that weren’t what I would call supportive. As a veteran in retail management I’ve never seen a company run this poorly, and I’ve witnessed some bad situations in my career. This is not a one-off situation. I am not just a disgruntled employee. This is not an exaggerated version of my experience. Do not entertain a job here unless you want to ruin your sanity. Also be sure to look closely at reviews you read in regards to the individual stores as it is common and encouraged for them to have friends and family post them.