Toxic Work Environment, Ageism, Horrible Stress - Assistant Store Manager Kohl's Employee Review

If you are enrolling in the manager internship or MIT program, I would highly recommend reading this review. I began with Kohl’s in their internship program in my home state during a summer home from college, and completed the internship successfully and was offered a job. That offer was remitted shortly thereafter when they realized there was some miscommunication on my graduation date by 6 months, and I had to enroll in another internship program at a different store in my college state and offered part time employment at another store in my home state in the meantime. This wasn’t the worst, because I knew I’d need a job in the following summer and I figured the part time employment in summer wouldn’t increase my hours to where I’d want them, so another full time position secured was nice. What they didn’t tell me is I wasn’t automatically “in” and would have to retake and pass the whole thing again. The first store I was at was okay, but my manager really just used us as free help and had us drive to various stores to help with projects, some up to 3 hours away multiple times. Mileage and paid travel is nice, but for some of these trips there wasn’t really a point to them, and nothing new to learn at these stores. Early on in the internship I expressed an interest in marketing, the degree I was enrolled in, and a recruiter told me that department transitions between stores and corporate were difficult but far from impossible. I was told a year later that it’s pretty much impossible. I worked part time during the school year, which was alright besides the fact that the admin there kept a tight control over hours and tended to give them to people she liked versus didn’t like. For the first half of my time there she didn’t like me, and then in the second I managed to get on her good side and got more hours. The manager there was great, but the ASM had severe anger issues and frequently had inappropriate outbursts towards employees and occasionally customers. There was multiple times I saw him throw things, break things, and yell. I was physically abused as a child and all of this made me very uncomfortable, and every manager I spoke to who knew him said he’d always been this way…yet the company did nothing. During the summer I worked at another larger store, with a larger manager team. The internship here went very well, and I had a great time and learned more than my last one. I liked the team here a lot, but there was lots of drama between managers, and the SM and ASM has no real control over the supervisors and they basically did whatever they wanted. They were very lazy and would take extended lunch breaks, mouth off, and be absent on a regular basis with no repercussions. This didn’t affect me much when I interned here, but when I did my MIT here it was a serious issue. The SM was spineless and was a “lead by example” manager, but unfortunately that approach didn’t work with his staff. Bigotry, casual racism, sexism, and political tension were very high here too, and all thanks to management. I was told the MIT would be 3 months and maybe “a couple weeks” until placement after passing. My MIT lasted almost 6 months before I got placed, and I was relocated 6 hours away. My current location has very low cost of living, and the pay gap between supervisors and managers was reasonable, considering managers are salaried and usually work more than 40 hours a week. The place they moved me to had the 3rd highest cost of living in the country, and they gave me a 2% wage adjustment to make up for it. I was basically broke as soon as I moved there. They provided $2500 for moving funds, all required to be paid back if I left in less than 2 years from that date. I had 2 weeks (10 days of which were PTO) to make the move from the date I was notified. The move costed about $3500 overall, and I was hardly unpacked by the time I started at my next store. I only lasted 5 months in my ASM position at my next store, due to the sheer stress, crazy hours, and horrible management I dealt with. I worked an average of 50-60 hours a week on normal weeks, topping at 65 during an inventory week. My supervisors made only $1.50 an hour less than me, capped at 40hrs. There is no overtime here, and they know that and will take advantage of that. I worked extremely hard, and was instantly set to being the “operations manager” because I was a man and all the men were assigned to the truck and freight. There were very few exceptions, and sexism was ridiculous at this store. The SM was horrible here, constantly stressed me out, was unprofessional, and brought her drama and frustration into work every single day. She treated me like I was stupid and spoke to me and other men like a child regularly. My training the MIT didn’t prepare me for this store properly, and I communicated that to her, but she was unwilling to teach me and simply was disappointed I didn’t know everything. I can only know as much as I was taught, and she made me feel awful every time I didn’t know something. She was awful towards the supervisors on many occasions too, and leveraged personal relationships to coerce them to do things. And our hourly employees? They were treated even worse. They were expected to accept hours with literally no notice, and I had to do call-ins almost every morning because of poor scheduling. If they didn’t come, they were punished with less overall hours, and that was the clear strategy in the back room. I was frequently texted and called when I was off of work, and my workdays were almost always 6am-5/6pm 5 days a week. Whenever I did anything wrong I had to have a “check in”, but supervisors never received the same treatment. We were encouraged to use and teach shady credit card application tactics, such as tricking elderly people and people who spoke poor English into applying, even if we expected them to not be approved, all to hit corporate goals. Speaking of goals, hitting goal was never enough at this store, our manager expected goal plus 50% every single day, knowing that this only increases the amount we have to hit in the future. If we didn’t hit goal? Angry phone calls, shaming, and blatant disrespect. I hated every single day at this store and the worst part is my team (minus SM and maybe 2 managers) loved me and I was great at getting them to listen to me. I felt awful leaving this place, but my last straw was my SM calling a meeting before November telling me and another supervisor without children that we needed to work more hours to make up for theirs because we didn’t have kids. Explicitly said that. I should probably mention my SM never worked more than 45 hours a week and often came in later than me and left earlier and would say that I “couldn’t leave” if certain things weren’t done, even if that’s because half our staff called out and it was physically impossible. Once I left, I had to pay back my entire signing bonus and moving expense. This job was the worst 2.5 years of my life, and I do not recommend it to anyone. I moved into marketing afterwards, and was beyond thankful to be out of retail management.