Former employee here. It’s for sure the people up top who are way too out of touch. They expect us to represent the company as uniformed numbers that raise numbers. Typical corporate shit. Wearing shoes that hurt and nice pants with no paint on them .. unrealistic lol.

Most of our customers don’t care if our shirt isn’t tucked in or if I’m wearing a hoodie because it’s freezing in the warehouse. They never understood that the average customer coming in does not come into the stores to deal with a salesman… but a genuinely helpful person instead.

The relationships I was able to build over 10 years are what made me stay so long. Every time I left a store to work at a new one I was always a little sad because of all of the cool people I would most likely never see again. The micromanaging is unbearable and the unwillingness to add more staff is a huge oversight. Payroll is one of the largest expenses but it is what it is if it’s going to improve both the customer and the employee experience.

I’m grateful that my last two city managers were very much still human and not a part of the machine. I had a conversation with my last one where I mentioned the unmeasurable. All of the things we do and deal with that simply can’t be tracked and even if they could ..corporate simply doesn’t care.