The office air conditioning is very cool.

There is a snack cabinet.

Most colleagues who are not managers are easy to get along with.

At the company, your salary initially consists only of the basic base pay, with little room for advancement. They say there is an annual performance review, but you cannot necessarily take it every year, and even if you pass, you only get an additional 1,000. They will even say, “That means your annual income increases by 12,000—that’s a lot!”

There is no year-end bonus. After completing one year, you receive a 1,000 gift, which increases by 1,000 each subsequent year.

There is no perfect-attendance bonus. Being one minute late incurs a penalty of 2, with no grace period whatsoever.

The internal performance review is an interview with the owner/manager about your achievements over the past year and how you can prove the new value you can bring to the company. In other words, they want you to do more than your original responsibilities.

The announced performance-review schedule for each employee is only a reference. Sometimes employees are asked to stay until very late to wait for their review. (Those scheduled for the latter half of the day may stay several hours past the end of their workday.)

The owner and managers are all extremely emotional, and they also like to psychologically manipulate employees and make empty promises. They constantly emphasize SOPs, but many internal systems do not exist at all. They may even say things to employees like, “I don’t know what you could do after leaving this place.” = =

The company holds a company-wide meeting every three months, an internal office meeting every month, and another department meeting. There are many ineffective meetings, and the company-wide meetings always take up a lot of time after work. They repeat more or less the same things every time, and employees also have to write in a notebook similar to a communication log, with every employee required to give a presentation in front of everyone.

For major company events, internal employees are required to work on holidays and are not allowed to take time off. Those who take leave and do not attend will also be gossiped about.

Employees are also required to come to work during typhoons. Basically, everyone is only allowed to take a typhoon day off when the department store closes.

Payroll is frequently delayed. When payday falls on a holiday, payment is postponed. On regular weekdays, the owner sometimes transfers only part of the salary first. Since I joined, I have never received my payslip on time during the same month.

After resigning, you can only return to the company to collect your salary in cash, and it is not necessarily available for collection on payday. You have to wait for HR or accounting to notify you. If collection is postponed, they do not proactively notify you; I always had to ask myself.

The owner and managers are quite superstitious about feng shui and fortune-telling. They use numerology to assess employees’ personalities and make preconceived judgments about whether employees are good or bad.

At the internal office, employees also have to take turns being the person on duty, maintaining cleanliness, taking out the trash, cleaning the bathrooms, and helping clean up after events. Sometimes they are also called downstairs to support the retail store as service staff.

The company trip is an overseas trip only for those whose retail-store performance meets the target. The first domestic trip for all employees has just been held (and it will not necessarily take place every year afterward). Employees who have been there for less than a year must also pay a fairly expensive amount, and those who do not participate have to make up the workday.

Unless you are truly passionate about metalworking or jewelry, I really do not recommend this job. Every day you have to deal with a pile of ridiculous problems, and you may even be reprimanded for working too much overtime. The overtime pay also does not comply with the requirements of the Labor Standards Act.