Pros
Optical retail is definitely a unique experience compared to apparel or “normal” retail as we say. Having patients that genuinely have issues with their vision and finding solutions for them is very rewarding. You can really make a positive impact on people’s lives when they have trouble seeing and you can provide them with glasses that are functional and comfortable. Learning the different aspects of retail/manufacturing/healthcare and how they all work together makes for an interesting, diverse, multifaceted work environment. There’s always something new to learn (some may view this a con).
Cons
It’s a pretty toxic work environment. Daily management duties include running the sales floor, managing your direct reports’ sales performance, overseeing/managing the doctor’s office, managing your patients’ incoming orders, fielding customer issues, overseeing lab operations and maneuvering an endless barrage of emails, text messages, group chats, Teams calls, etc from your regional manager, zone vp and 6-10 other corporate middle men and women whose only function seems to be to disrupt your day-to-day workflow by asking for surveys, reports, sales figures, schedules, action plans and other nonsense that need to be submitted ASAP with no other information or context only to never be heard from again. I understand we’re a business and we’re here make money. However the sales pressure that exists is simply unacceptable. My location has made comp every year for the last 5 years, year over year. Despite this consistent growth, every year we were made to feel like failures cause we missed our sales goal by less than 5%. That’s just silly. Corporate has one focus. How much money *could* we have made? You could hand them a million dollars and they’d ask why you didn’t make 2 million. The customer experience from store to store is wildly inconsistent, obviously because of hiring and training. Their training tools are ample and adequate but there’s not enough time to actually train and prepare yourself before you start to sell. Coupled with the fact that the training emphasizes selling the most expensive products, that’s fine, but you’re not trained to learn why, how or when to sell to sell what. Just make the number next to the dollar sign get bigger. Makes for a rocky training experience and causes customers issues that didn’t need to happen but it gets chalked up to a learning activity. A lot of these cons are nothing new to retail but with LC there’s retail issues and healthcare issues, coupled with high prices, unrealistic sales goals, unrealistic/unnecessary KPI goals and a high pressure selling environment managed by people with ZERO optical experience who were just a good interview (ENERGY! ENTHUSIASM!) and have no ability to run a business can make for a challenging workplace.