Workplace reviews and discussion: 雅聞化妝品/內衣/SPA_台灣雅聞生技股份有限公司

No, absolutely none.

From my very first day joining Bei You Department Store, it was painfully clear how little respect and attention the company had for new employees. In the middle of my shift, headquarters called just to confirm my ID number again? (Isn’t that supposed to be handled beforehand?) They promised two employee uniforms, but even after ten days on the job, they still hadn’t been issued. Yet they first had me sign for a NT$3,000 deposit by falsifying documents.

There was no pre-employment training. The new-hire training was entirely decided by the experienced employees and the assistant manager at that location. After just two days, they expected me to memorize the full names, prices, and capacities of more than a hundred products in the store—and the names had to be recited without missing a single character. Of course, understanding the products is reasonable, but the time limit they set was not!

After memorizing the product names, I was also expected to memorize the product codes. That was even more ridiculous. They had barcode scanners but insisted on manually entering the codes—it was completely pointless. During my first week, they only told me to memorize product names, so when customers asked questions about the products, I couldn’t answer because no one had actually taught me anything!

In the end, after I spent four days memorizing everything, they said I was learning too slowly and dismissed me, haha. Even though I applied for a retail sales position and they knew my specialty was graphic design, they dumped all kinds of work on me: Father’s Day promotional materials, a full-size livestream backdrop, and, before dismissing me, they even tried to pressure me into going home after work and using Photoshop to make an 814 Valentine’s Day poster. They really are the textbook example of using someone up and then kicking them out.

There was no overtime pay either. Even when you worked overtime, they forced you to clock out because another location had been sued and headquarters had been investigated by the Labor Bureau. There was no employee discount at the counter; if you wanted to buy something at 20% off, you had to go to the Yawen factory in Zhongli. It was unbelievably awful. During the interview, they kept making grand promises, but in reality, the department-store anniversary sale—the period when the industry makes a big wave of money—was only counted as an individual performance bonus, and the additional group bonus was gone! Worse, they only told me after I started that there would be no bonus.

Worst of all, even giving away product samples involved deception. The livestream prize draws were also just for show. Employees were expected to recruit friends and relatives to inflate the numbers because it didn’t matter whether they received anything or not—the company just wanted to use the headcount to overshadow members who genuinely wanted to participate in the draw.

They said I was learning too slowly, so they told me to come to the company on my day off to study, haha—of course, it was unpaid. Is the Labor Bureau really never going to investigate?

For such a large chemical manufacturer and company, Yawen’s education and training of its internal staff is astonishingly negligent and lax. Truly, it is a case of fine jade on the outside and rotten stuffing within.