-Salaried management often work 58-63 hour work weeks with no extra pay (some weeks my hourly wage would have been $10.61/hr with 44 regular hours and 19 hours at time and a half).
Reduced staffing levels after a few months of open. Each store competes with all the other stores so that you end up running whole days with just a single person in the department (which means you). I would sometimes be scheduled from 6am-6pm so we could make labor by cutting the closer's hours. Full time employees quickly get cut back to 34 hours and often have to work in multiple departments to meet their minimum. Expectations are kept at perfection so salaried managers have to pick up all the extra slack.
-Systems and trending software are terrible so managers need to constantly adjust orders and sales projections (often receiving conflicting messages about how much stock to have on hand. As little as possible so there is zero waste and product is fresh but you also better not run low on anything ever)
-Micro managed - you are responsible for your department, complete a balanced schedule for employees, watch labour, manage food cost, and train and develop staff. But you have to follow a strict manager schedule that doesn't allow you to be flexible with your employees, given less hours than you are contractually obligated to give your employees, have no way of monitoring labour daily/hourly without requesting a poorly detailed screenshot from HR or tracking every employee yourself manually, not having the time to develop staff because after 12 hours you really just want to get them set up and go home (because you have to be in again in under 12 hours).
-Advancement. For department managers, there is not much room as the store manager positions and other high level positions are often filled from outside the company (mainly from Loblaws). As I stated in the pro's there is a lot of opportunity to move up fast for the staff. Many turn it down though or become managers only to demote themselves or quit.
-When employees do leave there is no plan in place to replace them. Often this means departments are left without managers or assistants or even specialists. It can take them weeks to figure out who should be next in line. Employees are left to wonder what will happen (leading to gossip and false hopes) and forced to work extra hard to make up for the gap.
-Incentive programs are confusing and often counterintuitive. It took almost 8 months for an explanation of what was expected for bonuses and how the raises would be handled. Raises are firmly structured so store managers have little ability to incentivize hard working managers that help the store. Guidelines are extremely strict so there is no leeway for circumstances outside your control to be considered when determining bonus amounts. Either you hit your target or not. They don’t care how or why you did or didn’t meet targets so there is high incentive to cheat employees, suppliers, customers, and fudge the books.