Close to Zhishan MRT station
1. They didn't provide any update after the interview. At the very least, applicants have spent over an hour interviewing.
2. The office is very small and quite cramped.
3. The salary is below market rate.
The truth will not be reported to the boss. If it weren’t for employees’ family members advising people not to come to work, things would be peaceful and go smoothly when they like you; when they don’t, they join forces with the supervisors and office staff to replace you. They may even tell new hires how they treated the previous one (getting people to complain about the new hire, exaggerating things in front of the supervisor, and finding nearby employees to ostracize them). They also make an effort to explain to new hires how difficult, stingy, and superstitious the boss is (it is definitely not just casual conversation).
I only came to read the comments after joining the company, and they are really quite accurate. I hope everyone will think carefully before deciding. There are many other facts I don’t want to reveal, because saying them out loud would only be embarrassing for *the company (there is written proof for everything, haha).
Sweet talk
Very late.
Good relationships among store colleagues
The benefits are fairly good (bonuses and gifts for the three major festivals)
Low sales pressure
Strict dress and appearance requirements
Perhaps it’s that most of the employees have a strong sense of unity. Whether full-time or part-time, everyone can work together to get things done well, and they also keep each other in check.
The company seems to pay people based on its mood. Sometimes, when a holiday comes around, they only announce a few days beforehand whether salaries will be paid in the following days or what the arrangement will be. Whenever there is a national holiday, don’t even expect salaries to be paid early; sometimes there isn’t even an announcement informing us. The work atmosphere also feels as though you have to work according to the boss’s and store manager’s moods all day long. (Not all store managers are bad—when I went to support other branches, their store managers were very good and answered questions directly instead of giving irrelevant answers.) If the boss or store manager is in a bad mood, you have to be especially careful at work, because they may pick at your faults in every little detail.
Also, during the first two months after starting, you have to memorize product knowledge intensively. I can only say that I was lucky: when I first joined, the branch I worked at still had the previous store manager. He taught me very carefully and patiently, and I had finished learning everything before the store manager changed. However, when I saw the new employees who joined afterward, the new store manager’s attitude was to have the people below him teach everything. He would keep rushing the progress and check whether we had taught things carefully enough, but when it came to teaching himself, he would often say that certain things didn’t need to be learned or memorized. He was extremely lenient with himself during the training of new employees, while holding us to a different standard.
What surprised me most was that, as store manager, he would sometimes pass tasks down to the employees, whether because he didn’t want to deal with them or genuinely didn’t know how. If the head of a store doesn’t even know how to handle something, then how would the people under him know? Moreover, because I experienced two different generations of store managers, I felt that the company’s SOPs for handling matters were extremely inconsistent. At one point, I handled something according to what the previous store manager had taught me, but was later told that it could not be handled that way. I also told the new store manager that I had handled it that way once before and asked why it had been acceptable then but not now. The new store manager’s response was simply, “That’s impossible. You must be remembering it wrong.”
If the company changed its procedures for handling customer complaints, I could completely understand. But if the company does not announce the change to all employees and then criticizes us for handling something incorrectly, I absolutely cannot understand that. Also, when the company is severely understaffed, whenever headquarters needs people, the boss gives an order and insists that we go help. Even though the branch is already seriously short-staffed, people still get reassigned, forcing everyone’s shifts to be adjusted. Since the branch staff are mostly part-time workers, and everyone has classes to attend, adjusting shifts is extremely difficult.
Then, when you arrive at headquarters, you discover that the staff shortage is usually just an excuse. You can see the online-order packing staff pack a few items and then chat, scroll on their phones, and eat. Employees from other departments would rather sit at their desks pretending to be busy after finishing their own work than come back and help us. The part-time workers transferred there are simply extra manpower for them: while they chat and take breaks, someone else can still help with the work. Meanwhile, while you are working extremely hard and they are working extremely hard at slacking off, the boss will still complain that you are too slow and tell you to finish by a certain time.
Besides salaries often being paid late, their pay slips are also extremely unreliable. There have been cases where they were missing for one or two months, and even cases where a missing pay slip was never provided afterward. There is also often money deducted for purchasing winter or summer uniforms. The boss only says that the money will be deducted from our salaries, but in reality, you have no way of knowing how much was deducted because the pay slip does not clearly state it. Normally, if you change uniforms this month, the cost should be deducted from the next salary payment. However, sometimes, when comparing two people from the same period, you find that one person has already been charged while the other has not. It may only be discovered one or two months later that money was deducted from the salary. Without a pay slip, we cannot even confirm what the deduction was for.
Break time should be our own time. I feel that both the part-time and full-time employees at this company work extremely hard—apart from the new store manager. Sometimes, a full-time employee who arrived relatively late would initially ask a part-time worker some questions, but the boss would interpret it as chatting and start scolding them without understanding the situation. He would only say, “Why didn’t you ask the store manager at another branch? Why ask a part-time worker? Do they even know?” If we don’t know, then truly no one knows. When the new store manager is asked questions, he just says, “Huh? I don’t know either—what should we do?” Whenever we report something to him, he often gives us an extremely bureaucratic response, creating the impression that part-time workers know nothing. Yet he only dares to report things to the boss when the situation becomes very serious and has already reached legal issues. I don’t know whether he has told the boss that part-time workers are insignificant or what, but the impression this gives people is extremely disrespectful.
There is actually a lot more. I could go on at length about the boss and the terrible store manager. If you have any other choice, really, don’t come here. If you absolutely have to, then do not volunteer to take on too many tasks, because eventually they will dump everything on you. You will earn the same money, have deductions made for all sorts of things, and still be expected to do more work.
Most colleagues are very nice and will do their best to teach you. You develop a strong sense of camaraderie, though there are still some problematic supervisors.
The boss makes decisions by issuing an official document and directly asking you to sign it. During interviews, they talk about various benefits, but once you officially join the company, everything actually depends on the performance of the promotional activities. If the boss finds a way to deduct money from you, they will; if they do not want to give you a bonus, they simply will not.
The boss is also very stingy about raises and promotions. The pay is even lower than the typical salary for a regular full-time position elsewhere, and there are no established evaluation standards or exams. The boss makes the company vision sound wonderful, but in reality, they just keep dragging things out.
When performance is poor, the boss berates people; when performance is good, you still have to put up with the boss’s sarcastic remarks. One store manager has been there for a long time, but whenever you ask about something, they never know the answer, leaving the employees below them to figure everything out themselves.
Learning the products in the store takes one to two months (that is the approximate time it takes to get up to speed), and the boss keeps pressuring you about your progress. However, when the store is busy, no one has time to teach you, so the training is sometimes very incomplete. You have to rely on yourself to memorize things and learn through work experience.
The working hours are long. You are required to open the store half an hour early without pay, and if you do not clock in half an hour early, it is considered being late and your perfect-attendance bonus is deducted. This is extremely unreasonable.
The closing time at night is also not counted as overtime. Even if customers continue browsing and behaving obnoxiously after closing, you cannot ask them to leave; you have to wait until they finish before closing the store. Unless it is a special situation as determined by the boss, you only get paid if the boss personally says it counts as overtime.
The boss schedules staffing very tightly, so even if you are sick, it is difficult to take leave. They will ask you or the manager of the store in question to figure out how to produce staffing support. You can choose three days off, but choosing them is no different from not choosing them, because you still have to accommodate staffing needs across all the stores.
Basically, this is a toxic company hidden behind cute products. It relentlessly exploits capable employees while useless employees continue slacking off. In general, people in higher positions are quite useless. Of the three store managers, only one is problematic; the managers at the other two stores are both very capable. Front-line employees have to ask around, and if they end up with the problematic store manager, they usually have to rely on the managers at the other two stores to learn things.
There are many more unreasonable things that I cannot finish listing. Unless you are truly short on money and urgently need a job, it is best not to come here.