Had my last day yesterday so I can finally get this all off my chest. Fuck this company.
It doesn't matter how long you work there, you will not get a raise. I was making $15 an hour but I had to not only sell glasses, I had to know how to read prescriptions, know if certain prescriptions would work on a person and guide them to glasses that fit, and take eye measurements/do prescription checks. They expect you to know so much and you can't even get tipped for it
The average optician in my state makes $28 an hour and the opticians I worked with made $18. This obviously led to being short staffed and overworking the opticians we did have until they quit.
They don't do commissions so no matter how much you sell, you won't see any compensation for it, but you will be reprimanded for not selling enough. Let me be clear, they want their workers to push sales for fucking GLASSES, a minimum $100 purchase, no fucking way am I pushing blue light filter on someone who doesn't need it, and I am certainly not going to bring up having a backup pair unless they need it themselves.
Guess what happens if a store has good sales, more money! But only for the snack budget, if the managers give it to the employees they will be fired.
Multiple employees were given warnings for being sick. This isn't a manager issue, it's literally company policy. My manager apologized 3 times for giving me a verbal warning after I had covid, if he hadn't told me he would have been fired so I don't blame him at all.
Holiday season is a fucking nightmare, they have most of December blacked out so you can't request off bc it's insurance season. This year they tried something new and gave their employees 1 more dollar an hour, but only on 3 specific holiday weekends. This was presented to us as new and never done before and that was the day I updated my resume.
The holiday gift we got after working through insurance season during a pandemic was a warby parker art book that they discontinued so we literally got their trash (corporate people got money as a bonus)
Warby Parker presents itself as this altruistic down to earth brand but it is literally just like every other corporation when you look at how it treats it's workers. I'm literally going to work at a fast food place. A fucking fast food job pays more than them, embarrassing.
Edit: they say they promote a diverse and inclusive work environment and even did a collection with the black fashion fair but the AI they use for finding pupillary distance doesn't work on Asian people or black people but they still continue to push it. Multiple employees have said it doesn't work on anyone with non eurocentric features but ig that's not their target customer base. If you get glasses from there make sure they use the pupillometer to get your PD