1. Get to be exposed to a wide variety of Japanese products

1. At first, newcomers are given the impression that the environment is relaxed and that the work is very simple, but the demands gradually increase.

2. Treat part-time workers like full-time employees, and full-time employees like managers.

They give you no authority but still make you bear the responsibility. They rationalize everything, and even when they are in the wrong, they will twist it into being the employee’s problem.

3. Senior management or regional store supervisors love to conduct inspections, and employees often have to run around because of certain preferences of senior management.

4. Training is insufficient. They ask us to promote products without properly explaining the product information (only briefly mentioning product features verbally), and there is no material we can take back for reference. Many times, we have to look up the product information ourselves afterward.

5. The bonuses are quite low… which makes people lose motivation to promote products.

For example, if a product ranks among the top three in sales across the stores in the region, the store’s bonus is only NT$1,000.

Moreover, the company comes up with strange promotional packages and requires you to promote them.

6. Senior management at the company really likes using surveillance cameras to monitor everyone, which makes people feel very uncomfortable.

At the store where I worked, the store manager would check the surveillance cameras every day at work. The manager even installed the surveillance program on their phone to monitor everyone all day, spending work hours looking at their phone or watching the cameras in the office instead of doing their actual job.

7. The company culture seems to favor supervisors (senior management). Even when they are at fault, it is always considered our problem, and we are the ones expected to reflect on ourselves. The overall environment is extremely stressful.

8. Average starting pay, average bonuses, lots of miscellaneous tasks, and a heavy workload.

9. The company’s products cannot be connected in real time with Japan.

Many of the products can be found at drugstores elsewhere.

10. There are often double standards when doing things, making it difficult to understand what we are actually supposed to do.

Even when you have tried your best to cover all the bases, if something goes wrong, they will still desperately look for reasons to push the blame onto you.

These are my observations from working at one store of a Japanese drugstore company.

Whether the other branches have all of these issues is for each person to assess for themselves.