retail sales associate

retail supervisor

sales associate

seasonal retail sales associate

assistant store manager

Columbia Sportswear

My experience at Columbia Sportswear has been very stressful and demanding. This company and the temp agency doesn't care about it's employees! You're giving very minimal sick days during your contract of work as a temp (4 days) and if you call in sick during any of those four days you are lectured and the people in the temp office are constantly telling you that you're being written up and so on to stress you out more if being sick isn't enough. It's very confusing because the managers tell you to stay home if you're sick but when you call in sick to do them and everyone else a favor you get lectured and complained at about attendance and etc so it's very confusing. They say one thing and mean the other! When you start there the people in the temp office (kelly services) tell you that there is so much opportunity in the company and how it's highly rewarding and so on. Once you get working and talk to people around the company and figure out how things really are you realize that what the people in the temp office tell you couldn't be further from the truth. I've talked to all the coordinators and management and from what they've told me is that it takes forever (2-5) years to get hired on by the company from the temp agency where your expected to make a maximum of 9.80 in those couple of years which is hardly enough to cover gas and vehicle expenses if you have a decent drive ahead of you.
You work your butt off and never get any appreciation or anything even close to a reward for your hard work. As your time as a temp while working at columbia sportswear through kelly services you never get a single raise and you're expected to work there for a few years before even being considered to be hired on with the actual company and after being hired on the pay only bumps up by a few cents to ten dollars when you're expected to wait another year or so for another small raise. You get a pretty good discount in the employee store but the thing is they don't give you enough hours or pay you enough to be able to afford to buy any of it. When you work there you're constantly rushed and stressed out by the coordinators because they are constantly breathing down your neck. They also try to screw you out of your 40 hours all the time by shifting around your hours as much as possible if they think they might have to pay you for a few hours over time. For instance if they think they will have to bring you in for an extra day during the week for overtime they will send you home after four of your ten hours during your shifts during the week so they will have to pay you for 1-2 hours of overtime IF ANY! During my couple months working here i've only had one full 40 hour week. It's very frustrating working here and the whole point of me writing this review is to save whoever is reading this their time so they can find something better. I hope this helped someone.

Don't expect full time employment from Columbia. If you have primary employment, collect disability or have means, this is a good 2nd job or supplemental income. Not much room at all for promotions, raises or advancement. The managers are all very professional and expect everyone to handle a basic workload and display excellent customer service abilities. The merchandise is good quality and most customers are brand loyal so not much need to be a pushy sales person except when trying to get people to sign up for the loyalty rewards program because the data entry was time consuming and sometimes people would give a very hard 'no' to signing up but we were told to keep asking anyway. A lot of thought had to be put into coming up with a rap or script for yourself in order to pitch that loyalty program so it felt like 60% of my job was to sign people up. But it was only worth it for frequent shoppers there rather than people who only come in once or twice a year, but then you have to tell them they can shop online, so some acting and memorization skills are needed for that part of the job because there is a competition between all the Columbia Sportswear stores for statistics about new loyalty members and a string of customers who say no to signing up will bring your personal statistics down as well as for the store. They do keep track of all your personal statistics like number of customers, total sales and discounts, new loyalty sign ups, etc. and sometimes it was very annoying to have the managers consistently focus on telling you to bring the new member stats up all the time without offering any advice to help. Sometimes there are just days when not a lot of people want to sign up no matter how hard you try, because it's only rewarding to them if you shop very frequently. Especially when people live out of state and don't care for online shopping. Even when your job performance is satisfactory is all other aspects but is lacking on the new loyalty program members, it could be the one thing that could prevent you getting more hours and that was the one thing I didn't like about working there. Other than that, I enjoyed working there and would definitely work there again if I needed a second job. I used my employee discount to buy myself some nice jackets and shoes as well as gifts for my family.

I chose Columbia Sportswear because I grew up with Columbia Sportswear. Throughout my life, I had always thought the company to be reputable. I left of my own accord after two years of hard work and dedication to the company. I sold the product and was one of their best, that wasn't enough for management. My relationship with management was good and I put my faith in them, it wasn't until I started asking about promotions that I realized it was a one way street for them. Management picked favorites and lied to employees to keep them working, often changing their arguments if you dared ask them a question multiple times. The seasonal workers contracted were told if they put in extra hours (above 40 hours), that "increased" their likelihood of being hired; I watched 95% of them get fired at the end of the season and most of them before. Management also actively prevented individuals from moving up within the company, and discouraged applying outside of the department after you hit their arbitrary "one year mark" for promotion. I found out after I left that I could have been promoted within a year, as outlined in the employee handbook, which means my managers made the choice to lie not only to me but to everyone in my department. In the 2 years I worked there, I can only name one instance where management invested in my personal growth and that was less than an hour in total. If only I had enough time to go through the horrors I witnessed. Suffice it to say the final straw for me was when management gave me a .50 cent per hour pay raise after 2 years of loyalty to the company and made my bonus a flat bonus not tied to merit. Typically, when I leave a company, I'll still support the company afterwards but I can say with confidence that I will not be buying any more Columbia, Sorel, Mountain Hardwear, or Prana products.

Pretty much you get hired on through a temp agency. Your recruiter from your temp agency will tell you that every week you will have meetings with your supervisor to go over how well you are doing. The point of this, I was told, was so that you can know where you stand in terms of getting actually hired on with the company. Long story short, I only met with my supervisor one time, and that is when he told me that I was being let go. And, of course, I worked through a temp agency, so what else was I supposed to expect? The thing that really didn't make any sense was that they had another training class being trained immediately after me and 14 other people were told that we were being let go because it was "too slow." That literally makes no sense. So, the company gets rid of well trained people because it's going to be slow, but then hires another training class?! I am pretty sure they let us go because they didn't want to offer us benefits. I am actually 100% positive that is the reason because someone in management told me that while they were giving me a ride home one day. They also do not give their temps access to all of the programs that regular employees get. Not only does it make the temps job more difficult, you have other employees getting upset at you when you ask them to look something up for you because you don't have access to a certain program! The company will definitely give you 2 days off in a row, but time off being accepted is rare. The managers are very cliquey when it comes to who they actually want to talk that works there. In my three months there, I was probably only called by my actual name two times by a supervisor. Everything that I have talked about in this review is also things I heard from other employees there.

I made the mistake of taking this as a seasonal contract position. Everything seemed great in the beginning, with my background I thought for sure I’d kill it at this place. What a joke that turned out to be. Our training was experimental and they were trying a new technique supposedly. Joke number one. We spent more time in 2 weeks going over the one program that was the most self explanatory and about 2 hours going over the one program that was the most complex that we needed to use the most. This turned out to set most of us up for failure. Out of like 22 of us, there are maybe 5 or 6 left a month out of training. They don’t tell you that you are being set up to take billions of calls at the expense of company and warehouse mistakes. They don’t tell you that they purposefully send out the wrong items to people over and over because they’re actually out of stock of the things people are trying to get. It’s like they just pull random things off the shelf in the warehouse and go “meh looks about right.” Half of the calls are literally cleaning up after the company’s owns mistakes. Another quarter of the calls are people who never even get any items to begin with despite shipping and tracking saying the items have been delivered. Oh and those package investigations take weeks to complete. Half of your time between calls is answering emails to the same degree. They do have some cool perks but I’m convinced they do stuff like that because they have to find a way to boost morale in an otherwise mundane and very stressful environment. I would never recommend this job to anyone. I’ve worked far harder jobs, it isn’t that the job is hard. It’s just pennies on the dollar for the stress you deal with, and majority of the situations could be avoided if the company actually cared about the customers and not just the bottom line.

Took the job and was assured I would receive no less than 20 hours a week with an average of 25 hours a week, part time. First two weeks were good and the discount was nice until you realize the clothing is low quality garbage and you get tired of looking at it much less want to wear it. After the first two weeks my hours were cut to 10-12 a week and stayed that way with no explanation. The customers are loathsome, depressed housewives with nothing better to do than argue about a discount that is literally cents on the dollar, that and old cranky seniors. The co workers are all cool as it usually is in retail, with the exception of that one guy who everyone hates. The management was incompetent in many different aspects. Favoritism meant the difference between sitting in the back on your phone and handling lines of customers by yourself, all while everyone's getting paid equally. There were employees who simply walk out on their shift due to the terrible management. Also signed up for direct deposit and was told it would take a few pay periods. After waiting 4 months I decided to call HR in Portland, OR only to find out my information was never actually sent. $9.50 an hour was slightly above wages around here anyway so that's the only plus side. The store manager would sit in office all day and not do anything. Communication with employees was done through a piece of computer paper with instructions written on it. The manager literally didn't speak to the associates.Training was self taught after a few vague instructions on the cash register. Do yourself a favor and just go serve tables or something and stay out of retail.

Everyone, at your store, are generally sociable and nice to work with. Store & floor management will work with you on things within their control and are also pretty sociable. There will be times where it feels like store management doesn't have as much control or say on things that they probably should be allowed to have.

The Job itself is simple and easygoing. You'll talk about the sportswear and how it works for what weather condition, it's suited for. Each store has a designated area that you'll be assigned for, like many big stores. You'll also be signing people up for a free rewards program as well, if you're on register (not a credit card account, like some companies).

Like a lot of service jobs, some customers have been more difficult, since covid started, so good patience is probably gonna be preferred, depending on which location you work.

If you're looking for simple customer service work, to get you by a year or two, it'll get the job done. It doesn't pay as much compared to a lot of other companies around the city right now & you have to be full time to get benefits, for the most part. Realistically, there's not gonna be too much moving up, with this company. A lot of people tend to build their own path elsewhere while paying their bills with this. 

Anything outside of that will differ depending on where you're working at specifically, but all in all, it's a good place to start. If you want a good entry-level experience that you can exercise you selling skills, give this job a shot. If you're looking for a job that can challenge you, this will probably not be it.

I would get to work and clock in, after that I would go to the main office and get my "Gladiator" wrist scanning device, and Mic, so i could communicate with the office in the warehouse. I would then go up to my section of the warehouse that was located on the third floor, and pull boxes off the conveyor belt, I would find a place for the boxes on the shelves and scan the box and what shelf I put the box on into my gladiator. When I finished with that I would check my gladiator scanning device to see what boxes need to go on the conveyor belt down to shipping, find the boxes, scan them to let the office know they were on their way, place them on my cart. As soon as my cart was filled I would quickly take the cart to the conveyor belt, and unload the boxes onto the outbound line. If I finished doing all of that and had nothing else to do I would use my mic to ask if where I should start cycle counting, they would tell me where in the warehouse they wanted me to start and I would go there, set my gladiator scanner to cycle count and begin scanning the boxes and what shelves they were on, in order, so the office could get a accurate display of where the boxes are located.
It was a great job that I would be very interested in doing again, as the people were great to me and taught me a lot about how a warehouse works. The hardest part of the job was the commute from Vancouver WA to Portland OR. The best part of the job was the satisfaction of a hard days work, and a job well done.

What is the best part of working at the company?
To be honest the company had a different role in the beginning when I had the previous manager. But with the new manager and the operation manager it was not pleasant to work there they constant harassment from the upper management and the lack of the Quorum with the coworkers made it very challenging to work there. If I was you I was steer clear away of the River Gate location if you like drama if you like craziness if you like people not doing their work then this is the place for you.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Being very productive person if this is you you will be very frustrated every day. They reward laziness and the occasional buddy buddy type of environment. If you're a hard worker you will not like it in this environment due to the fact of your work will be minimized by the upper management they only brown-nosing while punishing hard work.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
, toxic at best whether you're in a VAS Department or the inbound environment is very very very hostile. Trust no one keep to yourself and maybe you'll get out alive.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
A typical day is you doing your role but with the lack of support you will be doing roles of several other coworkers that either incompetent to do their role or are not trained properly by the job coach themselves so expect to do over and Beyond and be treated with very little recognition and pay.

Complete lack of transparency and honesty from Logistics/Supply Chain leadership.  If you feel like something is off and your mind is jumping to conclusions, you are probably 100% correct despite anything leadership says/does to say otherwise.  

You are a cog in the machine and are easily replaceable. There is a reason you do not see a lot of tenure in the 3-15 year range as those folks figured out the older leadership that has lead to poor financial results the past 5+ years are not going to change anything. Those under 3 years were likely paid well to come onboard and are already looking to go elsewhere.

Company claims a lot of things but it is all talk.  They will say they are not a fashion company, yet one of the brands slogan is Fashion meets Function.  They well tell customers they do not make shoes or other items in various colors because they are not a fashion company, yet this is where the industry is at and is why the company is not growing.  They claim to support plus size models but only 1 of 4 brands has plus sizes.  

You will get pressured to wear Columbia from head to toe and anything else will result in ridicule from leadership including wearing non-Columbia hats while wearing Columbia boots, shorts, undershirt and button up shirt.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Retail sales associate 20 salaries reported	$18.01 per hour
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Seasonal retail sales associate 4 salaries reported	$16.00 per hour
Assistant store manager 2 salaries reported	$30.56 per hour

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