merchandising associate

reset merchandiser

merchandiser

retail merchandiser

installer

Signature Retail Services

I've been a part of the work force for over 25 years, and I have never, and I mean NEVER IN MY LIFE seen such a group of arch-villains. I really don't want to write a novel here, but I feel like I have to go over all the details to make ABSOLUTELY SURE no one else falls for the same trap that I did, so please, allow me to break all of this down for you.

I was contacted by a recruiter for Signature Retail Services (hereafter called 'Sig') in October 2019 and was asked to consider applying to the company. I was told that because of my extensive background as a merchandiser, I was being eyed as a 'rising star', and after a short two month probationary period, would be handed a large territory, consisting of many stores, each with their own set of opportunities.

The benefits laid out to me were thus: health insurance, company-matched 401k, gasoline and cell phone reimbursement, a 'competitive salary for my area ($16/hour, to start), and AT LEAST 15-30 hours per week (again, to start). I'm here to tell you that all of these were LIES. The health insurance is only for full-time or salaried employees, and to be considered full-time, you of course have to consistently work 40 hours per week for a set number of weeks. The company-matched 401k is likewise restricted. Gasoline and cell phone reimbursement DO exist, but they are extremely limited in scope, and restricted by certain conditions that must be met on a weekly basis in order to qualify. My 'large and expansive territory' also employs other merchandisers, and the workload is split between all of us (not evenly; they only give you access to the projects that WANT you to have), and the starting pay was an entire $1 less than what the recruiter stated.

But I, of course, fell for this, and happily signed up. What followed was one day of training, by a district lead who obviously wanted to be anywhere else in the world BUT there, kept rushing through the entire thing, and was looking at the clock the entire time. Sig expects you to use your own unpaid time to study an entire library's worth of documents that barely scratch the surface of what's required of you at each type of job they ask you to perform. I'll start at the beginning here and walk you through it all.

A week before the beginning of the month, Sig unlocks your schedule and posts your 'opportunities'. These are the contracts you are expected to accept, schedule, and perform during the allotted time period. Most of them can be worked any day of the week, from 5AM-11PM, but others are restricted to weekdays only. You are told that your schedule is your responsibility, and to only schedule for the times and dates you are available to work, and at first glace it really does SEEM like you have freedom. This is, however, another lie. Certain jobs will lock in place after the first time they are scheduled, and you will be unable to change the date or time without approval from management. Oftentimes additional projects will drop into your 'Opportunities' bin partway through the month, and you will be expected to shoehorn these into your schedule someplace.

Sig uses an app called 'Natural Insight' as a portal to all of your contracts and the materials that go along with them. It also acts as your time clock, and here in lies the biggest issue I have with Sig as a whole: They track you. I don't just mean while you're on the clock, either; Any time NI is open, and your device's 'location services' is active, the company is tracking you. You are expected to remain within the perimeter of the building for the entire time you are on-site - stray too far, pop out for a smoke, go to grab your wallet to buy some food or drink, and they will come down on you like 40 tons of bricks. Every single thing you do inside the app is tracked - What materials you read, when you read them, if you printed them off, what time you took photos, your geotagged location - all of it. This company takes Orwellian policy to masturbatory levels. Once you have completed a contract, you are expected to fill out a survey detailing what you did, down to the last detail. Anything you get 'wrong', anything AT ALL results in an immediate flag by the survey team. An email gets sent out to you, your territory lead, district lead, etc. Even the slightest infraction dings your job performance by a lot. When this rises above a certain threshold, you will get a singular warning, and a lecture from the company about 'incident rates'. If it happens again, you're terminated.

You are expected to use your personal printer at home to print off all of the materials for each job, even though they are easily accessible on your device through the NI app. You aren't paid for this, nor are you reimbursed for ink. This might sound like nothing to complain about, until you realize that in a typical month, you have between 60-80 jobs to complete.

Let's go back to the gasoline and cell phone thing. Yes, Sig does reimburse you for those things, BUT ON AN EXTREMELY LIMITED BASIS. The only way to get gasoline reimbursement is to 'game' the system. Sig pays you mileage and drive time for any miles that you travel to a location and back to your home or hotel room OVER 25 MILES. Say you traveled 30 miles to and back, you get paid for 10 miles. HOWEVER, what they absolutely won't tell you is, if you travel to more than one store in a single day, you get paid for ALL TIME AND MILEAGE BETWEEN STORES. All of it. So if your first store is 30 miles from your home, and your second store is an additional 30 miles from there. you get paid for all of those 30 miles, PLUS everything after 25 miles traveling back home from the more distant store. My advice to anyone and everyone who works for Sig is to schedule at least three locations per day, and try and make sure the distance between stores is at a maximum. It's the only way you're ever going to get paid fairly by these people.

You also have to 'challenge' your mileage nightly. If you forget and go to bed, NI will lock your mileage at 0.0, and you won't get paid what you're owed. You also just can't challenge, you have to provide a complicated math formula in the comments that demonstrates how you reached the miles and minutes you challenged for. Just another reason for Sig to belittle their employees and treat them like children.

The cell phone reimbursement policy works differently. It is based on the number of hours you work in a single week. Anything up to 15 gets you $5, but in order to get $10 you have to work 15-40. To get the coveted $20, you have to work 40-59 in a single week (which no one actually can, because your weekly hours are capped, and you cannot exceed them without management approval.

I suppose that for the right person, one who knows how to suck up to management and become a 'golden child', this job would be a decent fit, but for everyone else who just wants to clock in, get the work done, clock out, and go home, the constant threat of being fired over absolutely nothing causes more stress than it's actually worth. $15 an hour isn't worth your life, stay away.

The basic structure of the job is like this: every month, usually on or around the 1st, you'll be sent the projects for the month through an app on your phone, and you'll make your own schedule of which projects you want to do on which days. These projects typically take between 1-3 hours or so, and mostly consist of tasks like going to a store and stocking a particular product, or seeing if a particular sales display is set up, and then setting it up yourself if it isn't.  You clock in on the app when you start the project, upload pictures of your work through the app, and then clock out through the app when you're done.  Mostly pretty straightforward work, and if you ever have any questions then management or your territory supervisor are easy to reach and helpful. This would be a great job for you if you're retired and looking to earn a little extra money and get out of the house, are on partial disability, a young college student, or anyone else who doesn't need a lot of hours and would benefit from the flexibility. The work is simple,  and you get to talk to a lot of different people, but a major con is that despite being task/project based, the work is paid hourly, based on when you clock in and out of the particular project. If a project has a time allotment of 1 hour, but the project is "go into the store and see if this display is set up," you will often find that the display is in fact already set up, and that finding and photographing it only takes maybe 15 minutes. In order to fulfill the contract from the manufacturer(they pay for a specific amount of a rep's time, not just for a particular task) and get paid the full amount for projects like that, you will usually find yourself hanging out in your car doing whatever until you're closer to the end of the time allotment. Whether that's a pro or a con probably depends on you and on your car, but between that and driving between stores, you<i>will</i> end up spending a lot of time in the car.  You also do get paid for mileage, and a gasoline reimbursement, but frankly they don't really quite cover what it actually costs to run your vehicle. 

Overall I personally feel that I learned a lot at this job about the back-end of retail sales, about the management structures of retail stores, and about how to budget my time effectively.  It was an interesting experience and a fairly unique job, and I always felt supported by my supervisor and that it was easy to get ahold of someone or to get concerns resolved quickly. 

Depends on your experience but it’s a lot of work for the pay. The per diem, drive time pay and mileage compensation was awesome, not many companies offer all of that. They set up everything for you, all you have to do is show up and work. I will say I got a dollar raise within just about 6 months working for them. So I guess I can’t complain about the pay, just some companies do offer more at a start pay. 

Some of the project managers can be absolute trash, but the good thing is if you make it known to your Supervisor that you’re having issues, then they actually do something about it. I was offered to be switched projects when I was having issues with a project manager who was honestly trash. 

The coworkers were mainly always awesome, helpful, funny and nice all the time. There can be a little drama sometimes, but just don’t get yourself involved and you’ll be fine. I never had any issues with my coworkers. Time flies so fast most nights, especially when your assigned PM knows what they’re doing and you have a good team. Upside you can listen to music while working and talk to your coworkers! Gotta love that

I preferred doing resets in Lowes stores and that’s what I was hired on for, but sometimes other stores need help and so I began getting assigned to Home Depot stores when there wasn’t work at the lowes.

Hardest part of the job was carrying that heavy steel! Lol. The 5 inch beams and the waterfall racks were the worst!! I definitely got some muscle gains though, it got a little easier to carry them eventually and I could even put them up on my own! I didn’t have to though, there’s always help u just gotta ask! Don’t be afraid to ask ever!! They care about your safety. 

Best part was seeing a finished project at the end of the night. The satisfaction of “I built that” and the store associates saying “omg that looks so much better now!”
It was a nice feeling. 

Traveling was the best part of the job. I drove majority of the time,!which is fine because I enjoy driving my vehicle. The hotels were always pretty nice, semi good areas too. 

I would definitely go back to this job, they were so kind and helped worked out solutions for me when both my grandpas passed away within less than a year from each other. I’ll always be really thankful for that. 

Only reason I quit was because of personal health reasons that hit me out of no where. 

Honestly one of the best companies I’ve worked for. There’s some bad things, but it would always get resolved. So at the end of the day, it’s more good than bad. 

Overall, my experience in the job was enjoyable due to the flexibility it offered in terms of setting my own hours and schedule. I appreciated the ability to rearrange my schedule when needed without any issues. However, I found that there was limited room for advancement within the company. Although there were discussions about potential travel opportunities, my manager informed me that these trips had low pay and involved sharing a room, which was not appealing to me.

In the span of 20 months, I received only one raise. Eventually, I decided to leave the job due to the unprofessional behavior of my area manager, who demonstrated rudeness towards me. I brought this matter to the attention of HR, and although they addressed it, things became awkward afterwards.

After speaking with HR once again, my performance rating was adjusted and I was granted my second raise. However, despite this improvement, I chose to submit my two-week notice, ultimately deciding to move on from the job in Dec of 2023. 


Work somewhere else if need be. Was witten up multiple times in one working day for issues performing demos for disposable dumpsters!#! At the beginning of the cycle when you should be scheduling heavy for projects, I could not get my immediate supervisor to contact me or answer questions on where I should be working and when. After three days, and calling the President of the company himself, my supervisor finally got back to me. His reason for not responding was he did not know how to tell me I was being terminated because of the write-ups regarding the Bagster demos. That is part of a supervisors position, to be able to have tough discussions with employees and not leave them hanging. The termination happening on Thanksgiving was the real kicker. The President of the company got back to me in 15 minutes.

This company is horrible. No job security for starters. They will let you go even when you’ve done nothing wrong and they don’t give you warnings or write up or anything they will just let you go. If you are working for a store and the manger or lead doesn’t like you they will let you go. You can’t even clock out on your scheduled end time they want you to stay until the job is done, so mandatory OT.  If you travel and end up making it that far you have to share rooms. You have to buy your own tools ! Not just a hammer and nails, talking about drills more. You don’t get reimbursed!!!!!  You don’t work as a team and there is NO TRAINING.... you just have to learn it or you don’t. This is not a merchant job you are lifting heavy beams and putting things together this is construction... unless you are having seexx with someone higher than you don’t count on anything being fair.  You need to be a robot and silent to make it far at this job 

I literally wanted to work 40 hours a week and had enough stores to do so, They told me No, and TRAVEL TIME is considered work hours so They would not allow me more that an average of 25 hours a week, they paid .15 cents a mile which if you were to drive for them They would not pay the first 25 miles, and would not pay for the 25 miles coming back, So really if you drove 100 mils You were not paid for half of it. if you want to make money, Ide suggest going else where, as I was LOSING money working for them as they cut my hours after I got to a store 1 and a half hours away and only let me work 2 hours after driving 3.. I would drive an hour and a half work 2 hours and drive an hour and a half home, basically a 5 hour day that paid $30. so basically $6 an hour after spending the time traveling to the store. I want to work, Not be thrown around from store to store for pennies on the dollar.

I have been working here for 2 years, as a Part Time Employee.  The flexibility I have in completing work is awesome and all reporting is done on line using their reporting system on my phone. the work is in the retail environment, so it can get crazy at times, but most of the issues are not from Signature Retail Services.  If you are willing to follow instruction and ask questions when you are unsure, they are willing to work with you and give you guidance.  

I see a few negative reviews on here, those must be from people who are un willing to follow the procedures defined by an employer.  I was even invited to a call with upper management to state my opinions on company policies and procedures....they even paid me to attend the call and discuss my job with them.  what more do you want people????

Great perk of being able to set your own schedule. Very little opportunity to advance in the company. Terrible health benefits. I would be embarrassed as a company to offer my employees such low level health insurance. The company does offer profit sharing and yearly raises and bonuses. The biggest black eye in the area that I cover is blatant nepotism. The area manager hires and takes care of her family and leaves the rest for others. I would think that would open the company up to possible litigation but I don't know. The manager is also very abrasive so expect lots of attitude. Overall it's great for a side job because of the ability to set your own schedule, but the lack of opportunities for advancement and aforementioned nepotism will drive a person crazy if you wanted to seriously grow with the company. 

This company is awesome to work for. Yeah, you don’t get vacation or sick days, but honestly, you don’t need them with Sig Retail. You get the jobs sent to you for the month, towards the end of the previous month. You schedule the jobs for whatever time you want, whatever day the stores are open. You can move jobs around, take days off when you want, and stay home when you want, as long as your jobs are done by deadline date. It’s really easy once you get the hang of it. Your bosses, (well, at least mine here in Texas), are great! Always willing to help, answer questions, etc. You can always reach them. Honestly, the best company I’ve ever worked for. I highly recommend them.

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