99 Cents Only Reviews

Former Employee – worked at 99 Cents Only full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Excellent company to work for

Cons – More locations needed throughout the country

Advice to Senior Management – Keep working hard

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only part-time for more than a year

Pros – I honestly can't think of any.

Cons – Don't give a lot of hours, but expect you to do hours of work in a short period of time for low pay. Management lacks management skills. Not a lot of room to grow; if there is, it is given to manager favorites.

Advice to Senior Management – Go to school and get a degree in business management. Stop giving everything to your favorites. And start awarding the employees who actually deserve it.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – There are great people who work there.

Cons – The management team is very unprofessional.

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

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only

Pros – Opportunity to get good value items for cheap

Cons – Low Pay, Huge Amounts of work, expect managers to work 52 hours a week with really low pay

Advice to Senior Management – Look at your pay rates

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

Former Employee – worked at 99 Cents Only full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Great place to make friends

Cons – H.R. is a MAFIA there. If they do not like you, they will fire you. Especially if you tell them when something is wrong. You must be related to someone in H.R. if you want to make it.

Advice to Senior Management – FIRE everyone in H.R. and start fresh. Just like they did with CEO and upper management.

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

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only part-time for more than a year

Pros – Make good friends.
Its a job, I guess.

Cons – Too hectic and disorganized.
Still considered part-time even though part time workers and full timer workers, work the same hours and do the same job--so no benefits for "part-time".
Some of the management is lazy.
Terrible pay for all the extra work cashiers do.
Only get an opportunity for a "raise" once a year, but even then it's literally just pennies.

Advice to Senior Management – Get your butts in gear and get the stores cleaned up and don't favor some workers over others.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only part-time for less than a year

Pros – To be honest cant really think of none just if you make friends with co-workers

Cons – they work you as if they own you and you cant make any decisions. Dont ever ask for a day off even if your sick because they will take away days to work. They never promote you when they say they will. Managers talk to you as if your ignorant and you are crap. Some actually use vulgar and foul language towards their employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at 99 Cents Only full-time for more than a year

Pros – weekly paychecks
near locations
that's all the pros

Cons – very demanding
very stressful
you must work in multi different positions

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at 99 Cents Only full-time for more than a year

Pros – Possible quick promotion. Good benefits for managers.

Cons – Very indifferent attitude to employees. Trying to save every penny on basic needs but loosing/spending hundreds of dollars for nothing. Very low ethic and morale level.

Advice to Senior Management – Treat your employees like humans not things.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at 99 Cents Only

Pros – pay is equitable to comparable positions in the IT market for california. So if you work in TX, that means your pay is going to be decent for Texas but if you work in california, sucks to be you.
Relaxed and laid back most of the time. No strict dress code so you can wear comfortable clothes.
Generally the workers in the group are friendly and get along well, but interaction with mgmt can be strained at times.
lots of opportunities to learn new skills and technologies

Cons – Management - that word describes the beginning and end of this company's problems. When I say management, I mean everyone from CEO down to departmental and group supervisory staff. The CEO and family seem disconnected from everyone in corporate that is not directly supporting a store. The founder, Dave Gold has even stated that the most important job in the company is a stocker. I have to call BS on that one. The IT leadership from the recently promoted CIO to the architecture VP, Development Sr Director and their underlings are clueless as to how to do things the "right way" as opposed to the 99 way. Cheaper is not always better. Upper and middle management aside though, quite possibly THE WORSE part of working at 99 is the environment of fear and persecution that is pervasive throughout the organization but specifically in the IT group. Guys (and women) who come to the company with lofty ideals and great attitudes and superior skills are beaten down overtime with complicated change control processes, accusatory management that is only concerned with who caused an issue rather than let's fix the issue and learn from it. Additionally you can work on a project or an issue without a problem for years and then have a happenstance mistake occur and lose your job or be written up without any prior discussion from your manager, their boss or the officers, etc... That is total BS! No respect of your history is given to your current status. You are only as valued as your last good deed. Oh and if you do not work on the current hot button issue or project, your work is undervalued to say the least. Finally 99 has a list of what they call their core values. As an employee of 99, in the IT department for 5+ years I can attest to the fact that several of their core values are complete junk meant to be nothing more than feel good lip service for the officers and owners. For example, there is one that states BEST IDEA WINS - that is never true. It should state THE 99 WAY WINS and the 99 way is most often the most complicated way to achieve a result. Another one is EVERY PENNY COUNTS - again not true. For example how can a company spend 1 million dollars on an enterprise POS/ERP solution (SAP) - outsource is dev and install to a chinese company for several million more in cost and overages and delays when they have a room full of talented developers in house who could have written a solution tailored to the company's unique business model and warehouse infrastructure for practically nothing or why do the architecture and operations teams not have adequate money for monitoring and management tools that would make their jobs easier but at the same time they can purchase bloated tools like SCCM and VMWare Configuration Manager that over complicate their jobs at twice the price. It is this culture that makes working at 99 boil down to a daily gripe session by everyone that works there. I am glad I am no longer there.

Oh and finally in regards to compensation - The company has a plan to grow to 700 stores over the next 3-5 years. In CA each store averages approximately 5 million dollars in sales per year. In TX that average is 3 million. AZ and NV stores are comparable to california. At 240 stores currently the company makes approximately 1.5 billion dollars a year. So essentially in 3-5 years they plan to be somewhere in the 4-6 billion dollar a year range. Each store increases their bottom line almost 4 million bucks. How much do the employess see from that exponential growth?

In 2006 - 3% salary increase
2007 - 2% salary increase
2008 (during the so-called recession where 99 saw huge leaps in business and stock price) - 1.5% salary increase
2009 - 2% increase
2010 - 2% increase
2011 - 0% increase for most groups 1% for select IT groups
2012 - all signs point to 0 across the board.
Rich get richer and the worker gets shafted. I guess.

Advice to Senior Management – no sense in giving advice to people who neither want it, or would act on it. Management at 99 is completely top down and there is no room for the ideas and suggestions of those that do the work. One thing that would have helped me though - communicate any issue you may have with an employee better and give that person a chance to correct it. Otherwise, how can you blame someone for something they've done or not done when they don't have knowledge of the problem?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend