Bi-Mart reviews

Where to even begin?! When I was at my first store it was ok, long hours for retail and just standing on your feet at a cash register. If you had to use the restroom you would get yelled at if you didn't inform a Red Coat that you were leaving your register first. Their whole "employee owned" bullcrap is just that, it's bullcrap. You can be hired on at 18, but the way they have their ESOP set up is as a "retirement" so you can't even start earning until you're 21, so 3 years after you started working for the company, and then, you don't even get to keep anything you earn unless you give them 6 long years of your life. When our old store manager finally got fired things turned around for the better at that store. When I transferred to my new store, things started great and everyone was friendly. But then things went downhill quick. I was constantly being set up to fail I felt like, giving me tasks that would easily take all day and getting written up if I didn't finish it in 4 hours by myself. Their equipment is outdated so I personally was constantly hurting myself, not ever serious enough to collect workmans comp but still a lot. Very strict on how doctors notes have to be worded in order to come back to work after an absence. When I had a herniated disk in my back and was out for a few days to get the pain under control, when I gave them my note to come back they said it wasn't worded right, and it was on a weekend so I had to play phone tag to get my doctor to write a new note for 4 days, my manager got pissed and threatened to have me fired if I didn't get it figured out. Their vacation system sucks. They only have PTO (paid time off) and they want you to use it for EVERYTHING! If You call in sick they want you to use it so then you don't even end up having actual vacation to use when you want to take some time off with your family and if you don't have vacation you most likely won't get the time off. The second store I worked at was full of catty girls, not even women in my opinion. The store manager has a thing about working with men, she doesn't like to, so basically the entire staff was women, and we were doing some pretty tough work that sometimes I wished we had more men around to help. A lot of the stuff comes packaged really heavy and you have to break down pallets all by yourself even if you can't reach the top of the pallet which is totally unsafe. They boast about workplace safety but they won't spend the proper money to upgrade all their tools to make it a safer workplace. I felt like I was pushed out the door basically because management was never on the same page, it was always your word against someone else's, and they take the whole "customer is always right" thing too far sometimes. You can't really move up in the company unless you want to move to another location which is stupid. Corporate is a joke, they have no clue what's going on on the floor, they set up new planograms that make no sense at all, they come in once a month to criticize everything you're doing and then come back a month later and tell you that even though you took his advice and are doing it his way it's still stupid and has to change. There's no real support system, I wish the stores had an actual HR Representative at each store where you could take your complaints and problems to, because all they have is a bookkeeper and management, and a lot of the time your problems are with management so you don't want to go complain to them then they will just treat you even more like crap. Their whole system sucks, always understaffed and never seem to actually care about the employees.