Pros
- Great discounts on bikes, parts, and accessories - Work with great people. - Be a part of the cycle community. - Better than average training for basic skills. - Encouraged to do right for the customer.
Cons
- The Pay. You will watch friends leave because of the budget and then get an email the next day welcoming a new store that they took over. You can't keep telling your workers that you don't have the money for raises and then open/take over another store. - Overworked to the point of failure. Since stores don't have the budget, everyone remaining is going to have to "do more with less". The expectations and responsibilities keep growing but when you ask for help, all you get are empty platitudes. The harder you work, the more you are expected to do. - Communication is non-existent. If corporate ever does manage to address a problem, you can't be sure that they won't completely contradict themselves a month later. There is no consistency to anything Waterloo (HQ) says or does. If you are even lucky enough to get a good store manager, their hands will be tied by a useless corporate runaround. When I started with Trek is was told "everyone has their specific roles" and "do whatever you need to take care of the customer". When I left it was "everyone should be cross-trained" and "do right by the customer, but don't let it affect your budget". The real kick in the shins is that no one will ever recognize the change. It is Orwellian how everyone in Waterloo will act like "it has always been this way'. - District Managers are useless. In the good times, they would stop by once in a blue moon to hang out and talk about the good old days. Now that times are tough, they just come in to criticize. When they do show up, it is as nothing more than a time-suck. - Great Places to Work is a joke. Don't trust the numbers on this survey. Trek games the system by only allowing you to rate your teammates and your store. No one wants to castigate their teammates who are in the trenches with them, so Trek continues to receive an unearned score. This just furthers the point that your voice will not be heard. - Meaningless metrics. Your success will be judged on meaningless metrics and when those metrics don't show the company what they want to see, they dump them for a new made-up metric. Now even the service staff will have sales goals. - There are more issues, but the disrespect that came along with these six points are what caused me to leave.