Workplace reviews and discussion: 杏一醫療用品股份有限公司

1. The bonuses are genuinely pretty decent. After passing the evaluation, even a full-time entry-level store clerk who slacks off and coasts can still get NT$3,000–5,000.

2. Breaks are genuinely breaks—you can go out, or even go home, eat a meal, and then come back.

3. The displays at the several stores I’ve seen can only be described as hilarious. Unlike a certain competitor, where every shelf position and how everything is arranged is strictly prescribed, there’s a great deal of freedom to improvise. So... the displays are very casual, and the pressure of organizing the shelves is actually not that high.

4. The chairman visits stores all over Taiwan! And supposedly does so every year. That’s pretty remarkable. It means workplace bullying may exist, but it should be limited to some extent; otherwise, if a disgruntled employee preparing to leave gathered evidence and went over someone’s head to file a complaint, things would probably become very difficult to clean up.

1. Everyone is focused on workplace politics, then assumes that getting the politics right will lead to good performance. In my third month after joining, my individual sales were already the highest in the entire store. That’s right—it was that absurd, the kind of top sales performance that gives you no sense of accomplishment at all. Then I was ostracized. After that, the store manager actually helped the others berate me. I put up with it for half a year, then I decided to slack off. The funny thing is that the store manager has recently started worrying about performance, but I knew where the problem was six months ago and even tried to hint at it. Unfortunately, that store manager didn’t get it; they’re not the kind of person willing to humble themselves and discuss things with employees.

2. Uniform pay: people who coast earn about as much as those who work themselves to the bone to drive sales. Individual performance does count, but honestly, not for much; the main factor is the bonus. However, the bonus is divided among the entire store—in other words, even people who slack off can still receive quite a lot.

3. The mid- and senior-level managers at headquarters seem severely disconnected from the downstream stores. I once explicitly received instructions from a store manager to ignore or drag my feet on company orders if they harmed the store’s interests. And that order issued by headquarters really was the kind of ridiculous idea that could only have been thought up by someone who had clearly never worked in a store.

4. It doesn’t matter how many things you do right; one mistake can be magnified indefinitely. But the simplest way not to make mistakes is actually to drive customers away. With no customers, there are no opportunities to make mistakes. Combined with the advantages of slacking off, the result is continuously declining customer traffic and no returning customers.