As of today I’m no longer with that company, therefore I’m not going to hold back at all regarding my experiences there.
This might possibly be the worst job I’ve had so far. The reason has nothing to do with the job itself – it was a very straightforward and easy job. You get shoes for people, let them try them on, try to upsell them on socks and shoe care kits, nothing too demanding. Technically we’re supposed to follow some whole big plan (one of the steps is “four on the floor” where you literally have to bring out four boxes of shoes at once for the customer in addition to showing them all kinds of accessories to make them say “no” at least 3 times… not even kidding) but management at my store never cared about enforcing that thankfully. It also has nothing to do with the people I worked with (I met some amazing people I hope to be friends with for a long time) or even with management (they were just as dressed out as we were if not more). It had everything to do with CORPORATE and their bullshit.
I started off in mid September and everything was fine. I had one store manager to start off with (I’ll call her Jess) along with a co-manager (I’ll call him Tim). Then, in mid October, a store manager got fired at the other Journeys store about 16 minutes away from the one where I was working. Because of that, corporate transferred Jess over to be store manager of that store. This all happened within one day; there was no kind of transition period, nothing like that. Tim also left to go be a sales lead at that same store Jess was getting transferred to, partly because corporate was going to try to promote him to store manager and he didn’t want to deal with that responsibility, and partly because he’s best friends with Jess and wanted to be wherever she was.
So corporate brings over a new store manager for us. I’ll call her Bree. Bree was a co-manager at the Journeys Kids store before she got transferred over to be our store manager. She never had any kind of experience working as a store manager in her entire life – she had only ever done assistant manager positions, and being a store manager is a hell of a lot more responsibility than being an assistant manager. Corporate didn’t bother to train her or give her any help at all, she was basically just thrown to the wolves and expected to be able to handle this massive responsibility that she had never dealt with ever. They also promoted one of the sales leads (I’ll call him Blake) to co-manager at the same time, even though he explicitly told corporate that he wasn’t able to work co-manager hours due to being in college. So already it’s apparent that this company has a bad track record when it comes to giving people massive responsibilities and not training them for them at all.
The few weeks after that were chaos. We were consistently understaffed, so we had about 3 people working at a time on extremely busy weekends, and usually only 2 people working on weekdays. In addition to that, we were constantly getting huge loads of shipment every few days to the point where it just kept piling up and piling up, so much so that it was covering about half the sales floor. For some reason, Jess didn’t train sales associates to work on shipment, and even though Bree was willing to train all of us, we never had a chance to work on it because we were so understaffed. So it just continued to pile up and pile up, to the point where when we did finally get a chance to work on it, the stock rooms were already so full that we had to stack the new shoes we’d get in shipment on the floor in the stock room. It was complete hell; you couldn’t walk anywhere without almost knocking a whole tower of shoeboxes over, all the shoes started to become disorganized because people would start to try and put shipment away but never finish it so you could never find shoes when customers asked for them, and it was stressing all of us out.
Everything came to a head this week. Bree had been really stressed out for a long time having to deal with all the responsibilities that corporate had just sprung on her out of nowhere. Her mental health was really deteriorating, and she didn’t have a chance to try and get it done herself because of the way corporate scheduled people. Bree is also autistic, so she has a lot of problems with executive dysfunction and burnout. |+c a few days ago, everything boiled over mentally for Bree. She put her foot down, turned in her keys, and quit on the spot. Corporate was working her to the bone, while not giving her any kind of training or help, and expecting her to be able to deal with it when not everybody can just be primed to handle such a huge responsibility as managing an entire store. Then, after Bree quit, corporate tried to promote Blake to store manager. Blake of course wasn’t having that and quit on the spot as well. If he already can’t work as a co-manager, what makes you think he’d be able to work as a store manager?
So of course everything is crashing and burning behind the scenes. I had already been really stressed out by this job, but now that basically our entire management team quit, I wasn’t going to stay on board a sinking ship. Especially with Black Friday coming up in a few weeks, it was going to be hell on earth. So I went to another store in the mall, explained the situation at Journeys to them, they gave me an interview and basically hired me on the spot. Since my district manager (I’m just calling her DM) was already at the store today to help us out, I told her that I had another job lined up for me and that I didn’t want to stay with everything spiraling out of control. She says okay, and straight up ASKS me (pay attention here) if I’m going to finish my shifts for the week. I tell her yes, just put this Sunday in as my last day in the system.
Wellll, fast forward to today. I wake up early, I shower, I pay for a Lyft to get to work for my second to last shift… only for me to get there and not be able to clock in. Turns out… my DM WENT AND TOOK ME OUT OF THE SYSTEM. EVEN THOUGH I NOT ONLY EXPLICITLY TOLD HER BUT SHE ASKED IF I WOULD WORK MY LAST 2 SHIFTS. I tried to call her several times and ofc she was unreachable. I sent her a text asking why she took me out of the system when I told her that Id work my last 2 shifts, and she didn’t even respond for another 3 hours where she said “I thought I predated it.” I was pissed in the moment when it happened bc she literally straight up ASKED if I was gonna work my last 2 shifts, plus I was getting skimped out of at least $80 on my last paycheck, but at this point I don’t care. All I know is Im completely done with this company.
TL;DR don’t work for Journeys, the pay is absolutely garbage (8.25 with no commission), corporate throws responsibilities onto people with no training and acts surprised when they’re overwhelmed/wanna quit, overall they don’t value their employees at ALL.