Raises for promotions are only $0.25 per position (excluding management). Employees eventually feel over worked and underpaid, especially when spending weeks to months training for a higher position that only results in a raise of $0.25. The company says wages of employees are set based on the cost of living of the area the store the employee is employed at, but they do not adjust the hourly wage when the cost of living in those areas increase. Additionally, the stores are often size exclusive. The most consistent customer feedback stores receive is that plus-size clothing barely exists in the stores. Clothes that come across the buy counter each day are impossible to predict, but the wholesale clothing that is sent to each store is curated and selected. About 15 % of the inventory in a buffalo exchange is wholesale clothing (referred to as 'New Merch'), of which they select the styles, cuts, from vendors. Every few months stores submit a "New Merch Report" that lists high/low selling items/styles, and provides a section for "Requests" (items/styles the store needs). They also include a New Merch Meeting where an employee from each store location video chats with the New Merch Department Representative who selects and orders the wholesale clothing for the store and gives the employees an opportunity to speak on what they wrote in their NM Report and verbalize anything else they think the store needs. Over and over again during the video meetings as well as on the written new merch reports, employees from different Buffalo Exchange store locations verbalized that stores needed more plus-size inventory. Each time they were met with a different excuse: "it's hard to find wholesale plus-size clothing" or "it's more expensive to buy". Eventually, employees and management were instructed that we could not bring it up in the meetings or on the forms as they were "already aware of the problem", but nothing would change. Long story short, there is a way to increase the available plus-size clothing in the store and better live up to their "there's something for everyone" mind-set, but they won't spend the money to represent more body types. They're effectively robbing themselves of profits as well as alienating an entire portion of the new and returning customers that visit the stores to shop. I worked there for 3 years. The need for more sizes was brought up the entire time I worked there. Eventually, the subject of the lack of plus size inventory was brought up by employees so frequently that we were given a power-point print-out that instructed us on what we could and could-not mention when filling out new merch reports/or when speaking during meetings. Needing plus size clothing for the stores was one of those points we could not mention.
