T.K. Maxx Reviews

Former Employee – worked at T.K. Maxx part-time for more than 7 years

Pros – People
Pay
Career advancement
Staff facilities
Charity work/ corporate responsibility of the company
Customer facing roles
Varied roles

Cons – Poor, incompetent management
Management treating associates like dirt
Expected to always work above contract
Inconsistency between stores re treatment of staff
Never finishing shifts on time due to management incompetence/understaffing
Poor work life balance - often expected to finish at 11pm and start at 7am next day.

Advice to Senior Management – Learn to respect associates, treat them like human beings and provide them with a work life balance. Perhaps by hiring more staff instead of spending the money on fancy DVDs and the useless and pointless EPC scheme.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at T.K. Maxx

Pros – Workmates.

Nice customers who genuinely pity you for working in TK Maxx.

Get to see new items arriving before customers see them (shame you can't actually afford them).

Opportunity to gain NVQ in Retail.

Cons – Pretty much everything else. TK Maxx will promise the earth at their fancy induction, however your career and qualification aspirations are not likely to live up to expectations. Often management brush requests for further education/certification under the carpet, and prolong "training periods" as long as possible in order to avoid giving you a pay rise. Cutting costs and keeping peeps on minimum wage is what it's all about.
TK Maxx is primarily driven by the bottom line, which means that overtime that you complete is often conveniently missed off from your next months payslip (if you're lucky enough to see your payslip, that is) and monthly pay is often incorrect (my last monthly pay was short by nearly 100 quid).
Being that everything revolves around TK's profit margins, this means that staff in-store are thin on the ground, ensuring angry customers waiting in long queues and Management running around like headless chickens (and phoning you up on your days off begging you to come in). If you miss your alloted break, due to serving customers at the till, or having to clean up mess on the shop floor, you are pretty much snookered.
Other "fun" aspects of working at TK Maxx is the number of ignorant/rude customers that you will encounter. Often these are the people who insist on throwing boots/shoes/clothes anywhere and everywhere, as the effort to put shoes or items back in the places where they came from is highly challenging, and therefore items should be thrown on the floor, or over rails, where they can be exposed to maximum damage. Often, as a TK Maxx associate, you will be required to spend your Saturday evening searching for "mismates", and reuniting one shoe/boot/glove with the other . Good wholesome fun then. Many of the tasks that you perform late at night, long after the customers have gone home, could have been completed earlier, however the fact that many of the managers at TK Maxx are completely incompetent (experience talking here) usually means that less important jobs are completed first, or you will spend much of the day "multitasking" between 8 or 9 different jobs, and completeing none of them.

When you do eventually finish your shift, management may require you to attend one of their pointless meetings on your day off. Usually management won't verbally communicate the meeting, however they will leave a message on the whiteboard for associates in the hope that they will attend a two hour meeting at 8am on a Sunday morning where you will be thrilled to watch several dvds from HQ telling us how wonderful TK Maxx is, how much profit they are making, and what wonderful products (that we can't afford) they are launching in the store.

All in all, possibly the worst place that anyone would want to work at. Truly the seventh circle of hell in a nutshell.

Advice to Senior Management – The best feedback would be:

* Please stop making promises to employees that you just can't, or won't, keep. To be promised so many things at the start of working here, and to find that people's hard work is rewarded by endless and meaningless promises (of promotion, qualifications etc) is purely disheartening. On Monday I shall be handing in my notice after completing over a year at TK Maxx. It has been a huge learning experience, but not an altogether positive experience.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at T.K. Maxx

Pros – Good pay in around minimum wage level and general increases on a year to year basis linked to the rise in inflation

Cons – extremely hard worked with little staff numbers and expected to cover to many areas of the business. overall bad management

Advice to Senior Management – delayer the business get rid of floor managers who literally walk the floors and do nothing remember it is a discount store stick to that

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend