Wine Rack reviews about "people"

I can't think of any

Upper management is questionable at times, and only full time employees are management

- Minimum wage Wine Rack employees are paid minimum wage with very little chance for increase (you get the bare-minimum wage increase yearly). Occasionally they will set sales targets on specific products which, when sold, act as commission bonuses, which only serves to belittle any commitment to ensuring high-level customer service since it is now merely pushing someone to a wine or product they initially had no interest in. (Consistently see people lying to customers, hyping up products or saying they possess qualities that do not fit what is being requested by customers during these 'SPIFF' periods. I don't blame the employees for doing what they can to raise an otherwise stagnant wage, I blame management for not paying employees a living wage.) - Complete apathy from higher ups. Upper management and executives of Wine Rack luckily wont overburden you, because they take no interest whatsoever in their lower-level employees. The expectation seems to be you won't be around long anyway, so may as well work to keep the revolving door well-lubricated instead of attempting to keep good employees around. I have (reluctantly) worked at Wine Rack for 5 years, and with the exception of a single holiday store visit, have had no communication with the management team above my store managers. - Very little room for growth. Not too long ago, members of the executive and higher management positions were filled by people who were formerly employed at the front-end store level. Those days are now gone and the most an employee can hope for is that their store manager quits or passes away so they can vie to take their position. Also not uncommon for 'Assistant Managers' to possess the title and responsibilities of co-managing a store with no pay increase whatsoever (paper work is stalled or never filed at all so the pay increase promised is never registered). I could go on, but it ends up at the same recommendations as the pros: If you're not a student or a retiree looking for very casual work, then this is not the place for you. If you are one of those two things, don't take it too seriously (because management don't take you seriously) and enjoy your time with customers.

Pay structure. Lack of growth (basically no growth options). Increasing work load for the very few managers and team leads, to obviously save money. Shifts! Wine rack has been cutting managers down in numbers, and making store managers take care of multiple locations. That isn't a manager, that's akin (but not quite) a regional manager. This causes the team lead to do an in store managerial job, without the title, or pay. Only managers are considered full time, despite team leads working the LEGAL full time hours. This isn't legal, and team leads do not bring this up because they are need the money, and are too stuck in the job to find another one. (Time, job security). Managers get extra financial bonuses, despite doing NOTHING to earn it; employees do not get financial bonuses. The lowly employees who do the work do not get bonuses; not even the team lead does. Shifts are minimal, and this is clearly a strategy. Employees will be hired when you ask for more hours. Your hours will get cut, even if you are a very hard worker. Shifts will change without notice, or being asked if it works for you after weeks or months of becoming accustomed to the same shifts. Minimum wage, and 2 or 3 six hour shifts a week does not warrant this behavior. I'm not sure how other stores work, but mine brought in a LAZY, two-faced, manipulative, and slyly malicious employee from a different store which was not under our manager. This new person was given shifts that had been long standing employees shifts. This person now gets more hours than the other employees that were there first. This person does NOTHING at work unless the manager is going in. This person doesn't know where wine commonly lives, and moves bottles around that didn't need to move, to seem like they are doing work. The manager seems unaware of inconsistent statements and promises. Manager has little to not awareness of who a quality employee is, and hires willynilly. Manager off handly belittles employees, while boosting self. Rewards get promised, not followed through. The company claims within job listing is not accurate. Prices are often incorrect. Filing shifts, or pulling-up to do more in certain times (for example, during the LCBO strike, or holidays) does nothing for your job security, appreciation, or rewards. Rewards are messed up. If you sell x amount you get y. This does not take into account that custom shifts (which you likely used to do, but was taken away by new employees) will obviously make more money. Useless.

-Awful pay, no benefits. I had a coworker while I was there who had a dibilitating tooth ache for 6 months because she couldn't afford dental care on her pay there. It was awful to watch her suffer. Another coworker had to drop out of school to take on more hours in order to make enough money to pay her rent and not get evicted. The only reason she'd started working at Wine Rack was to afford school after Ford cut OSAP. -Not a very strong union, although this is partially the fault of high staff turnover, meaning people don't get very involved -HIGH STAFF TURNOVER. 50% of employees don't last a year. There's no opportunity for advancement and the maximum raise you could get when I was there was either 35 or 40 cents per year, but management was explicitly told not to give anyone the 4/5 or 5/5 rating on their evaluations that would give them the maximum raise. Most people got 10 cents per year. Why would anyone stay when there's no chance of ever making a living wage? I got out the moment something better came along. -The company treats workers as expendable, then complains about high turnover. Hint: YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. -Hard work is not rewarded: when we made record profits at our location, we would get, at most, a gift card, usually to Wine Rack itself. We could sell $10,000 worth of wine in a busy day and not even get a thank you, much less a bonus -Good work went unacknowledged, but any mistake was noticed and punished. People sitting down or eating something when the store was empty would get them in trouble if the manager checked the cameras, even though no customer was present. -Physically punishing working conditions: we had to carry hundreds of boxes of wine twice a week during delivery shifts without even having a cart to put them on: we had to carry them by hand, and every single worker at my store had back problems as a result. They also made workers show up at 5:30am for some delivery shifts, even though the store opened at 11, and there was no extra pay for those grueling shifts that had workers arriving when it was still dark out. For night deliveries, we sometimes had to wait as late as 1am for the truck to even arrive, and then spend over an hour getting the boxes inside and confirming the order. -Unsympathetic management: when I sprained my ankle, they made me do a load shift anyway and wouldn't let me do modified duties since I couldn't "prove" I was actually injured. When I went to the doctor and got confirmation that my ankle was sprained, they demanded a doctor's note, which cost $25 at a time I was making $14.15/hour. This was just to be allowed to sit down WHEN CUSTOMERS WEREN'T IN THE STORE. They wouldn't even get me a chair: I had to sit on a cardboard box and jump up every time someone came in! Years later, my ankle is still messed up. My doctor told me not to put weight on it, but obviously looking good for customers mattered more than my long-term health. -Management "promotes" workers to the Manager in Training program without giving them a raise, and then keeps them there indefinitely: as members of the program, they aren't union members, so they don't have the protections of regular, unionized employees, but most of them will never be promoted to manager. It gives them false hope in order to make them side with management against their fellow workers, promising them something that the vast majority will never get. Wine Rack is only allowed under union rules to do it for 1 year, but at my location, the MIT had been in the position for 3 years and only made $14.85. Everyone knew he wasn't going to be promoted to the point that people frequently joked about it. Managers would talk negatively about him behind his back but to his face they would promise him that eventually he'd get a management position. It's just a way to break up union power and keep those workers around without giving them a raise or a pension or benefits. Sick and cruel. -Union busting: when workers went on strike in 2020 management did everything to prevent people from striking and to break the picket line. Calling the cops on us, observing the picket line and sending creepy messages to workers who were picketing asking if we still planned to work there, sending out emails insulting the integrity of the union, refusing to bargain in food faith. They knew most workers were too poor to afford to miss paid shifts for strike pay that was significantly less, and that if they just waited long enough most workers who did picket would have to give up out of financial necessity. They also withheld $200 grocery cards that they had promised to all employees, saying that they couldn't give them out because of the unions actions. They knew how poor their workers were, and that $200 in groceries could be the difference between eating and not eating that month. In the end, the strike folded and workers only got a 5 cent raise. They depend on people's economic desperation to keep them from fighting for better.

Can be very hectic sometimes.

Condescending Management Minimum Wage Pay Not a ton of perks