truck driver

retail sales associate

sales associate

order picker

stocking associate

DSW-Designer Shoe Warehouse

The job overall isn't difficult. There's a structured process in place to help you execute and many peers with a lot of tenure in the company to assist with the learning curve. Miami market has alot of talented leaders with many years of expertise. The payroll model is lean but with strategy you are able to execute the job. 
The leadership above Store management isn't very involved with the processes or the operation so you have the autonomy to run the operation much like a business owner. The unfortunate part is I feel the Market Leader should be more engaged with adding value vs baby sitting and watching everyone else be the creative.

It would be nice if my leader could also present innovative ideas to grow the business and create experiences for both the employee and customer. This experience feels like the Market Leader's interest is "leveraging" others skillset while he focuses on watching the numbers. Pros and Cons with this but I don't think it takes much brain power to look at reporting and watch everyone else work. The senior leaders should hold everyone accountable to innovative value add vs putting the full accountability on store leadership. This can make the job feel toxic at times and many other leaders share this thought. Most people won't speak up in fear of retaliation so they keep quiet in vote of job security. 

Cool job and company, experience could be improved with a Market Leader who knows how to think out of the box and lead through example! In Miami there's a Market Manager instead of a Market Leader. Every person regardless of the position should be held accountable to contributing to the business. My view is if they like you as a person or you're part of a "network" you can maintain your job even if you lack the skillset to be a value added LEADER. If I receive  poor feedback from a visit lead by the Regional Director the Market Leader should be held accountable as well if he's involved when doing store visits vs hanging out in the office. Market Leaders visiting stores and sitting in the office are irrelevant, they should stay at home and work from their computer. If the purpose of coming to the store is only to be in compliance there should be a re-evaluation of leadership. People respect commitment and the behaviors that are on display make it evident that compliance is the goal. Hence my statement of Miami having  a Market Manager and not a Market Leader as the company title states. That's outdated and unacceptable on all accounts! 

Working at this place is boring, weird, repetitive, and dissociating. It's like a combination of the movies "Groundhog Day" and "As Good As It Gets" into one. In the retail world, we have something called "recovering". Basically, the items in the sales floor are to be organized and arranged neatly. This is essential for a retail store. However, at this company they take that to a whole different level beyond anything I've ever seen. If a worker is on the register and they make a mistake, from the lack of training, management will assign them right back to the sales floor to do nothing except walk around in stupor "recovering". What's worse is any questions that customers have are not even able to be answered since management doesn't bother to go over any important details about any of the job positions one applied to during the training phase. There will be a constant feeling of being confused and uninformed whether you're on the sales floor or on the register. Examples of things management never cares to inform workers is what part of the store certain shoe brands were moved to on a weekly basis, current promotions that are going on, and how to ring up specific things on the register like when a customer wants to add money to a gift card. Hilariously unprofessional. But it gets even better. The schedules are always scattered and constantly changing with no notice ahead of time, and workers may have to show up at the last minute due to the management's incompetence. What's more annoying is a worker might have either an excessive of hours one week, and barely any the next week. Schedule shortages are a regularity and happen often. On top of all that, workers are highly underpaid for all these absurd and unnecessary obstacles. I suggest to look elsewhere, if you have thought about applying here. There's no room for growth, no quality training, incompetent management, an abundance of OCD-like tasks, scattered scheduling, and severely low pay.

At the location I worked at I had a pretty bad experience with the managers. They were extremely rude, unhelpful, & uncooperative. Coworkers were somewhat friendly but mostly trying to not get into any trouble with management. 
A typical day starts out with you clocking in, grabbing a radio and announcing yourself to everyone on the shift. Following that you meet up with the manager to get an overview of what is happening that day (promotions, coupons) and what needs to be done. Things like stocking items that weren't finished before opening or finding, scanning and packaging shipments. But mostly you will be at the cash register checking people out or helping them find a specific item or placing an order. Aside from that you need to help on the sales floor and continue any other assigned things. 
Opening the store isn't bad. It's you and a manger. The manager will always be in their office before opening. Things that need to be done are cleaning the restrooms, hallway, fountain, breakroom, vacuum the store, take out trash from all areas, clean the cash register area, the doors, begin packages that need to be mailed out for the morning pickup, open packages of items ordered by customers to be delivered to  the store and call to inform them, as said earlier stock up on items for current supplies or new ones and much more.
Closing was the easiest unless it's the holidays. That's when a large number of returns or last minute change of minds at the register happens. Putting them all back for display is frustrating. Same shoe different sizes or sometimes you'll have one shoe and can't find its pair therefore you have to report it if you can't find it and they basically make you endlessly search for it. You clean like openers would and so on. 

This is the WORST job I have ever had! My first day working my manager put me on a cash register during a promotion and I had to check out over 50 people in a span of an hour. I had no idea what I was doing and no one was helping me which led to customers becoming extremely angry with me- I have never encountered so many rude and horrible customers than I have here. They pressure you to sign people up for the point system even though A LOT of people clearly don't want to sign up for it; if you don't sign people up, management scolds you and makes you write a paper about why you failed at signing people up and what you can do to better yourself at this task. There are also way too many things to be doing here; if you're doing cashier, you're not just checking people out you're also prepping sales items, printing off tags, or filling out order. Their cash register system is HORRIBLE, AWFUL, AND THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER HAD TO DEAL WITH IN MY LIFE. I have YEARS of retail experience, and I have never had to deal with such an annoying, worthless cash register system as I have working here. It is so difficult to learn, the scanners are ancient and you have to squeeze them with all the strength in your body in order to scan stuff, you have to look stuff up on this complicated website on the cash register to order items for customers, and sometimes coupons or points don't work and it messes up the entire cash register. I also got in a car accident before coming into work IN FRONT of my store and they still told me I needed to come in to work. They will literally work you to the bone. Do not work here unless you love working under intense pressure.

I worked at 2 locations in my 5 years with this company. The original location i was hired at was okay. Managers were kind of pushy and didn’t really have respect for the sales associates. When a new associate was hired they expected them to know everything by their 3rd day of work. Managers would also take it personally when people quit and tried to constantly avoid doing their job.
Second location that I transferred to was the complete opposite. Managers were great, willing to be flexible and didn’t take things too seriously and actually helped us. I developed a great relationship with them and still talk to them despite no longer working for the company. 

Location is everything at this company. During my 5 years I frequently traveled to other locations to help out stores who were short staffed or having a hard time managing shipments. Some stores and managers I really liked visiting and helping, while others I would tell my boss I never wanted to go back cause the employees were rude and unhelpful. They did pay for mileage and overtime if you went over 40 hours, which I frequently did but this is not a common thing so don’t expect it when being hired on. Average hours is 10-25 for most sales associates. 

I worked for the company for almost 4 years and was promoted to Sales Supervisor so there is room for growth. I had issues with store management being lazy and was against me being promoted even though I had more than enough experience. She based her decision making skills on whether she liked you or not which should have never been the case. There was also a lot of playing favorites in the workplace, and it when it came to having children and working there it was kind of hard balancing the two. They wanted you to put the company first before anything else it seemed like. To be honest the customer base that came with working there was horrible most of the time. I'm not sure if it was the area in which the store was located but most days we all had to deal with rude, nasty, and entitled customers. Most days associates wouldn't even want to ring on the register because of how nasty people were. They also pushed the rewards program pretty hard with the associates. There were times when an associate was threatened with a write up  if they did not get enough customers enrolled in the rewards program which also prompted a lot of the associates to not want to be at the register. Overall the pay was decent and the associates and some of the management  were a thrill to work with, but Management definitely needs some work.

Management takes advantage of workers who perform well. Instead of sharing the workload or rotating job tasks amongst the team, managment gives the easy job tasks to their favorite employees, their friends, and assigns the grunt work to the rest of the team. For example a new hire who "vibed" with one of the assistant managers got to skip 1 month of sales floor duties and was assigned register duties not only her first week on the job but for an entire two months. Normally new hires have to work on the sales floor for at least a month and have high membership sign ups before getting assigned register duty. Management didn't even track her sign ups, or hold her accountable for having the least amount of sign ups. Another example is when the store started implementing check out service via tablets. We were told that tablet duties will be rotated amongst the team. Nobody wanted tablet duties. One person on our team excelled on tablet duties, but only because management promised she could go on the registers if she got a certain amount of check outs and sign ups. She exceeded management's daily goals for the tablet that day so she could get assigned to the registers. However, because she did so well, management stopped rotating tablet duties amongst the team and just assigned her to tablet duties which was not fair to her because she ended up getting stressed out and then eventually burnt out. 

When I started off working it was very fun. Everyone was nice in the beginning. You do many different tasks. After a good few months I made a friend which was nice. And after a few months you get to know everyone a bit more. I found that there were a lot of nice managers and employees. However there started to begin problems. Before the store had closed due to the virus I was told by only one person who was the friend that I made that another employee had started spreading rumors and telling other employees about my personal life. Now I never received an apology or anything. No manager came to me saying sorry. Now I wasnt too upset at the monent. All that had been done was that the employee was told not to do that. Now when the store opens up again. I found out a lot of employees left. And I was put on shifts with the employee that had spread rumors of me and I started to get uncomfortable as they would always give me looks. And other thing that started bothering me was that everything was very inconsistent. There was a Manger who would always repeat the same thing more than needed to me. And they were also a bit rude. I found out later on my last week that the same Manger was also rude to my friend. So there was some good and bad. You always need a good group of people to be able to work together. 

1.) Tedious 2 or 3 Interview Process made to make you feel important and you think there will be job opportunities. Not true. A 2 Week Training period makes you think they want you long term. Not true.

2.) You will work a horrible fluctuating 15 - 40 Hours / Week for 3 - 5 Months. After holiday season is over. 90% of call center employees get laid off. $2 Million dollars and the company does NOT care about employee growth. Call center just wants to motivate you long enough to MAX out $$$ for company and then they WILL get rid of you.

3.) Your education and hard work and perfect attendance is NOT relevant. Your evaluations of 85% or above are meaningless. Your honest customer service skills are not recognized: even after you receive a customer satisfaction reward. Even if you came into the job with 20 years of customers service experience (knew a few who did) they also got laid off.

4.) Do NOT work in the call center. Their 10 Managers/supervisors are over-worked and there is very little moving up for a better position. Job growth NILL so be my guest if you choose.

Customers are insanely messy majority of the time and you're left to clean up after them (But that's just retail for you). Managers and corporate are very concerned about metrics. If you don't sign enough people up for rewards, sell enough imbox, or have good conversion, you're getting chewed out. You're expected to do the role of multiple people (I.E Registers, clean bathrooms, take out trash, vacuum/sweep, customer service people on the floor, organize boxes, send out online orders, and much much more) 

I don't believe the pay is worth the job. You're doing more than the managers are most of the time and you're getting paid less. Managers play favorites and are either really laid-back or the devil incarnate. 

I appreciate how flexible scheduling is especially as a student, it's easy to use PTO or schedule time off in advanced. Corporate nit-picks every thing and don't even know how to work their own systems/have never worked a full shift as an associate themselves. 

Online training is ridiculous and is not helpful at all. Theft is an absolute huge issue and we're not even allowed to call the police or do anything about it. There's always an issue with incompetent staff, managers that don't know how to do their jobs, and DSW is very stingy with pay.  

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Truck driver 354 salaries reported	$1,000 per week
Retail sales associate 2 salaries reported	$10.50 per hour
Sales associate 5 salaries reported	$11.00 per hour
Order picker 18 salaries reported	$26.31 per hour
Stocking associate 8 salaries reported	$14.88 per hour

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