Cute clothes, but prep time is unpaid - Retail Assistant City Chic Employee Review

The discounts and some of the information learned on the job were great

The culture there was toxic. The amount of information needed to know on the job was a lot to learn and had to be learned quickly. You had to only wear clothes from the company but the clothes were expensive. Overall, though, the actual environment there was awful and between the direct supervisor and the supervisor above her I was constantly made to feel miserable. Gossip ran rampant on top of that, and mind games about shifts were played. Eventually I wasn't even let go, they just stopped giving me shifts. There was consistent staff turn around both before I arrived, while I was there, and after I was no longer given shifts.

The workers of each store are lovely. A lot of them love the company philosophy and it shows in their skills and how they process each sale. The employee discount is nice. Casuals get 2 x 70% items, part timers get 3 x 70% items and managers get 4 x 70% items per week.

The area managers are like hawks and you're sent roughly 10+ emails per day tracking the performance hourly. Managers encourage a bad environment as you're quite literally ordered to follow up and borderline harass customers into telling you things about their day / what they're shopping for / etc. Heavy emphasis on upselling / pushing for buy now and pay later options for customers when dealing with larger transactions. You are just a number to them. Their way of thanking the workers for their hard work over the entirety of 2023 is a $30 voucher per team member (which isn't even 1 hour of work for full-timers base rate) to go towards our end of year Christmas celebration. Only if we reach our budget (which is obscenely high for a company that's relying on 'surprise' sales constantly) will they so graciously give us $60 per person. It's a joke with the amount of money your in store employees make for the company.