I left because of toxic culture - Anonymous employee Away Employee Review

1.0
5 Dec 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

People are smart, driven, and talented. Teams are collaborative and value one another.

Cons

Read The Verge article, Daily Mail, and Business Insider about Aways culture before applying. Also don’t believe everything you read! The CEO asked a select group of people to write positive reviews (requests were made in a private slack channel). Also, the communications team responds to all of these messages. Many employees are under NDA and aren’t comfortable posting reviews. Additionally, every employee has stock options so don’t review the company in fear the options will be taken away. People cry at the office and are often distressed. There’s a deep fear that they’ll be fired or berated. HR didn’t feel confidential or proactive. There are many same day firings with no warnings. Team members are so terrified that they screenshot their slack messages and some team members even secretly record their one on one meetings. Our cofounder had 7 assistants in one year. No one could learn their names fast enough. It’s an impressive company, which is why it makes it hard to recognize how manipulative and twisted it is to its employees. It’s fun to be part of something new, shiny, and successful which creates a cult-like culture. Leadership says jump - we say how high. You’re looked down upon for working from home and for taking PTO. After a very disconcerting expose from The Verge about the company’s culture, leadership ignored it. They encouraged employees to pretend nothing happened as opposed to creating a collaborative and healthy discourse about culture. Please be wary when applying.

Explore other reviews about Away

5.0
10 Feb 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Excellent team-spirited colleagues who would not hesitate to help one another whenever they can

Cons

None to think other than having room for growth.

3.0
13 Apr 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Free luggage - Working with fun coworkers in store - Away generally has good values as a company

Cons

- They don't give annual raises for COL, the only way to get a raise is to move up. There are only so many keyholder or management positions available... - Depending on your position you are either going to be doing hard physical labor or spending hours a day doing nothing - The company doesn't seem to have a lot of revenue. I think they let a lot of upper management go, they're reducing the lifetime warranty on products to five years, and are seemingly looking for ways to cut costs all around - Rules seem to be applied unevenly at store level - The rollout of new technology and new policy is chaotic at best. Things are rolled out before they're fully baked, ie the new warranty policy has a lot of unanswered questions and during a manager all-hands meeting the answers were "we haven't worked that out just yet." Their Shopify rollout is still half-baked and there aren't fixes for things like doing exchanges. Why would you put your employees in the position to have to explain that there is not a way to do an even exchange, you're going to have to return the product - which takes up to five days to go back to your bank account, and then repurchase the new item? Customers don't care that you the retail employee has no control over that, and they'll tell you off for having essentially double the amount of their purchase out of their account for up to five days.

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