Where to begin....as a company the cast iron product they are best known for is great, but they have a long way to go to improve their support for employees and business practices. This company has a number of practices that show they have no care for their sales staff, who are simply a means to an end rather than seen as the backbone that can make the company successful.
The wages paid are the minimum necessary and the bonus system is outdated. Each time California minimum wage goes up, there is no raise for positions that are generally higher paid because of greater responsibility. The result is that key holders go back to making minimum wage, but in essence have greater responsibility than the sales associate for running the store and act as the store manager when the manager or assistant is not working. The assistants and manager also do not get an increase so the percent difference in pay as related to role in the store/company constantly gets smaller and smaller. Corporate knows that the minimum wage is changing regularly, when that change is planned, but they do not plan ahead for it and simply react to it. Once a year they give a merit increase based on individual performance that is so small it fails to take into account the disparity between the employee classifications, and causes all those with huge roles in running the store to keep being placed back to minimum wage. This is causing the loss of many good employees, but the upper managers seen not to care.
The company has a bonus system, which is nice, but it is not geared toward employee performance. It is geared toward store performance with the employee sales as an afterthought. IF the store meets it's sales goals, then the employee can get a bonus. But it is not really a fair bonus. Those who consistently perform well only get a bonus if the entire store makes its goal. Those who regularly perform poorly also bonus.
In addition, the company used to give the employee a 75% discount on products. This encouraged many employee sales. But one store was found to be catering to resellers and reselling themselves, so the discount was reduced to 50%. Now, the employee has no incentive to buy the product it sells since they get it for the same price as the customer on a good sale or when the occasional coupon is sent out. Instead of holding the employees responsible for this policy violation to answer, every SALES employee in the company was punished. Upper Management still gets a huge discount. If corporate actually considered the poor wages they pay, they might see that some employees would not have done this if they were paid better.
The company has a huge hatred of resellers and policy is to refuse to sell to a customer if there is a belief they are reselling the product. Maybe management missed the fact that we live in a capitalistic world, and that legally, once a person owns something, they have a right to dispose of it however they wish.....including selling it.
Le Creuset uses a specific sales training method to identify only one acceptable way to sell the product. They do secret shops that grade an employee on how well they use the system. Actual sales results are ignored. While some of the methods taught are useful, holding the employee to a robot standard is ridiculous and hinders their individuality. Plus, the focus on multiple weekly spreadsheets filled out by the employee as part of this system is a hindrance. The POS system, if it was worth owning, should automatically generate this information as it does for other stores/companies.
This company is trying to grow too fast and is beginning to fail because of it. New stores open fast and often, but the basic corporate level support for them is not growing as quickly, if at all. This causes failures at the warehouse level and in HR, who can't do anything without approval of an invisible committee. It takes 3+ months to replenish product sold because the warehouse has no effective system for replenishment. When shipments arrive, there is a lot of damaged product and it appears that items are simply thrown into boxes that arrive half full or so full they are too heavy to even lift. The store level gets complaints often about the customer service department, who never answers the phone and never calls customers back who leave messages to the extent that customers spend literally months trying to talk to a human being. The company in the last year has purchased a new POS system that is so user unfriendly that many stores don't handle sales to be shipped to avoid having to go through 7 screens to ship an item.
The upper/middle management push a cheerleader mentality that is beyond juvenile. Constant emails: "Go! Go! Rah! Rah!" If you are busy, nobody has time for such nonsense, and when you are not, there is enough to do to keep up the store's appearance to make this ridiculous. You can literally delete 50-100 of these emails each day on a weekend. Company contests play into this also. The contests usually have high expectations (which is good) with insulting prizes (a $7 mug or Pie bird). As a result, most employees don't even report meeting the contest goals because the prize is not worth taking home. In addition, you have to actually send email to say that you made the goal; upper management is either too lazy to run reports to identify winners or the poor POS system they just bought can't run such reports.
They have a system in place that combine jobs of area and store managers. This results in area stores receiving less support. Area visits are not productive; the response to questions tends to be remarks that make you feel like you are stupid rather than educating you as an employee. The system of having the two jobs combined is a problem as it creates an atmosphere that interferes with employee performance.
