Cost Plus Reviews

I have been working at Cost Plus

Pros – Good coworkers, fun music, colorful aprons,

Cons – Arrogant corporate employees, unreasonable expectations to sign up world marker explorer members, low pay, backbreaking work. Not recognized for all hard work.

Advice to Senior Management – Respect the "peons" who work in the store. We are people too. Stop the bullying about employers losing their jobs. Come down off your arrogant ego trips and try to work a full day on a hard, concrete floor. Listen to the people who work the floor day in and day out.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Cost Plus part-time for more than a year

Pros – Good product variety. Great customer base, just fun to work with the cool customers! Met so many wonderful people, young & old.

Cons – Corporation hired 40 people of all ages and race to open a store. Had a good Corporate crew to set up and train. Hired a GM with no retail experience, who kept friends & unskilled manipulate-able people over skilled mature workers who had a voice. Five months after opening they fired half the employees without warning. Management got rid of anyone not like them, be it values or ethnic background (for real!). Pressured employees to push the store program to the point of alienating customers: "out-of-towners & old people with no email, push push push, just make that 30%."

They willfully twisted any employee policy to fit their need: positive if they want you to do it (leave a shift early when asked so it will help cut stores spending), and negative if they want to get rid of you or cut your hours (You aren't a team player because you always want to leave early). So twisted!! And like the employees don't see this happening?

As noted in other reviews, they hire more people only to cut hours of existing employees. They seemed to start with a good organizational plan, only to let it completely fall apart by enabling unskilled management to make bad choices again and again and again. No learning curve from mistakes. Didn't make good on their promises of hours and benefits to any of the many employees they made it to (I was not one of them but found this reprehensible).

Advice to Senior Management – Your inability to read people's character for the purposes of hiring management is severely hurting your corporation. I think if the top cannot make a good choice for skilled and mature general managers, where is there to go but down?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Cost Plus part-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Cool Employees, variety of foods, drinks, and customers that appreciate your hard work more than management.

Cons – No Management structure. Its Associates/Department Heads against Management. Department Heads have so much on their plate, they must be:

Cashier, back up cashier, listen for badge needed, customer service, security, Product knowledge of entire store, Handy man/woman, supervisor, and (Furniture) lift anything that say "Team Lift Required" by yourself cause you cannot find help.
                                                  \ /
                                                  Department Head

Since merging with Bed, Bath and Beyond, There is no help or guidance. All we see is more problems, tougher goals, less pay, and no hours to be heard of. If there is any good to come out of it, The rich have seen it, and left not a crumb.

Advice to Senior Management – Customers are starting to see the stress and sometime the true behavior of our management team. Communication is key. With all the meetings and talk of teamwork, none is practiced. Being on the same page, so us lower people won't be confused/ pissed that we have move half the store around due to a minor update. A pat on the back, telling us a good job could lift our spirits a bit, instead of focusing on the bad. We all try our best to meet goal, but management need to put in the effort to help and not watch us "drown" fail. If we "drown", do you realize that you "drown" too cause you did not help.....we are on the same boat.

Really Don't know how much I can take. . . . . . .

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Cost Plus part-time

Pros – Great variety of merchandise
Low prices

Cons – -I have never been under so much pressure/stress from management about their free rewards program.
-If you don't make above 30% in Explorer they WILL reduce your hours.
-They start at 8.50
-Be prepared to work your butt off... You are in charge of mopping the entire store some nights and cleaning toilets and taking out trashed plus recovery. You might as well clock in as the cleaning department.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't punish employees and take away their hours when they are trying hard to get people to sign up in the Free Rewards Program. I wonder if the company just wants to sell customers emails to make a profit. That would make sense.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Cost Plus part-time for less than a year

Pros – The supervisors are typically older women (never married or perhaps divorced) who have entered into this work because they have no transferable skills. This means that the bar is set pretty low for a newbie sales associate. A great static environment for those resistant to change.

Cons – Communication styles are obscure. Cat fights and gossip are relatively frequent and difficult to escape from.

Advice to Senior Management – The males who enter into a management position at World Market typically do so because they cannot compete with other men in the industries which require common sense and forward thinking. Recent graduates who have obtained a degree in "fluff" (liberal studies, music theory, Chicano studies etc,) are ideal candidates to move into management.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Cost Plus part-time for less than a year

Pros – Easy environment to adjust to if your a seasoned retail worker -e.g. you do most of the work and others ether take credit or your efforts go completely unnoticed.

Cons – Little to no advancement opportunities. advancement is about schmoozing upper management and not based on work ethic/performance.

Register and bookkeeping systems are so old and outdated that simple tasks take much longer than they should, and makes it very easy for thrifty management to steal without blame!

Wide disagreement among management about certain procedures and rules, training is practically non-existent, simple information for new associates is only learned through constant prodding of a supervisor, who will often disagree or contradict the information or instructions of another supervisors or managers insight.

It would behoove OSHA to make random visits to any of WM warehouses, as employees are in constant jeopardy of sustaining concussions due to the sloppy and cramped spaces where they are expected to complete freight and furniture load outs. Inventory is obviously not a priority as often there will be no room on the sales floor to work freight in with existing freight! Trucks come on thursday's so between running aronud trying to complete customer requests and helping the lines along at the registers, there is hardly time to complete freight in the allotted time during the weekend and early week before the next arrives. Products are not sold fast enough to compensate for the replacements.

lack of 30% WM explorer sign ups are constantly used as a tool to reprimand employees.

Seasoned employees train new employees (in my case, I trained a supervisor after being a cashier for 5 months) with no extra compensation or appreciation.

Hours are laughably inconsistent, schedule is often never correct. Most workers are part time and management will hire more people and cut staff's hours to compensate for newbies. Management turns a blind eye to simple scheduling requests such as "dont schedule me to open when I close the night before."

Advice to Senior Management – Work your store, train new associates! Management takes too much time to respond to service pages, knows less about current products/sales/coupons than average cashier, hides in the back office when store is busy, uses negative reinforcement to motivate employees. continually breaks shift change protocol (counting register after cashier is done ringing) overall does not help, but hinders work morale and productivity.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Cost Plus part-time for less than a year

Pros – The discount and the variety of customers and product make it interesting. The coffee and food discount is nice.

Cons – Managers are completely out of touch of what needs to happen in the store, horribly lacking in employees (i wonder why), and lack of communication, unrealistic "reward member" goals. CPWM has gone downhill since Bed Bath and Beyond bought them out.

Advice to Senior Management – Maybe if you weren't such a tool people would enjoy working for you.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Cost Plus part-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The products are awesome, and usually pretty good quality. You have food from all over the world, interesting art, pretty good wine, most at prices that aren't super expensive.
The customers are fairly easy-going, I think because the store tends to attract people who are more relaxed in general. The store sells things people want, not necessarily need, so they tend to come to the store to take their time and wander.
The employee discount can be impressive on large orders, or things on sale.

Cons – Where to start? There are problems at every level of the totem pole, from stock to PoS. There is a complete lack of common sense from the managers, who seemingly don't know how to, or don't care to do their jobs. I understand that it has to be hard to run a store like Cost Plus, but there are so, so many problems that it seems excessive.
Problems with stock not putting out products on time, leaving trash all over the store and taking (video-taped) naps while scheduled for work? Problems with the PoS person hanging out in the office, not knowing how to update signs, put out signage for things on sale and losing the store thousands of dollars because they don't know or don't care to remove the few signs they did put up? Problems with sales associates not knowing the products or not knowing store policy because they aren't properly trained and are spread way too thin thanks to horrible scheduling because there are simply too many of them?
These are all problems that the store has had for a long, long time now, years in some cases, and all of them can be traced to continued failures in management.

I'm honestly surprised the store is still functioning, given how long these things have been going on.

Advice to Senior Management – Our district manager needs to take a more active hand in this store. Either he, or someone else from Corporate needs to spend a couple days at the store, maybe disguised as a new hire or a vendor if it's not the man himself.

Really, take a look at the way the store is run, look at the incompetency, look at the bloated amount of Associates and Stock, look at how much money the store loses by them not knowing the product or current policy due to horrible scheduling, improper training and lack of 'giving a crap', look at how long the PoS person has been sucking at their job and losing the store thousands of dollars, and then start firing people.

Considering how many people need jobs, it can't be hard to find new stock crews, PoS people, managers, sales associates, who actually want to work and want to be there.
This widespread apathy is how stores and entire companies go bankrupt.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Cost Plus full-time for more than a year

Pros – Benefits and pay are decent

Cons – Flippant management, blind leading the blind policies, zero investment in employees

Advice to Senior Management – For HQ: hire team leads that know what they're doing and you'll have a much better staff retention rate. Time and time again, unskilled managers freaked out and fired people for no reason because they lacked the knowledge to find a real solution to the problem.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Cost Plus

Pros – Good discount
Lots of cool products from around the world to purchase
Get to meet a few interesting customers in the area

Cons – The management never listens to any suggestions of improvement
Management at my location was actually mocked by other managers in the company because no one liked working for or with her
Management treats the employees like they are children
Unreachable goals from employees
Rude middle management who actually mock customers when they are still in the vicinity

Advice to Senior Management – You need to listen to your employees when suggestions are given on ways to improve the store and increase profit
You are running the business into the ground with your crazy focus on the rewards program in stead of on actual sales
You need to be better at making the work schedules so not just one person gets stuck closing every single night
You need to practice common decency and not make people do the work without the actual promotion

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend