Big 5 Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Big 5 part-time for less than a year

Pros – Easy
Very cool managers
Fair amount of job freedom

Cons – Must wear shirt and tie
No commission

Advice to Senior Management – Add commission

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Big 5 part-time for less than a year

Pros – Flexible schedule around school needs.

Cons – Bottom of the barrel pay. Other retail stores consistently pay all levels of employees more.
Work includes pretty standard retail tasks but Big5 stores are a mess; the location of their products are completely scattered and hard to find.

Advice to Senior Management – Store managers should get paid more. They work terrible hours and get paid poorly even though they are pretty good managers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Big 5 full-time for less than a year

Pros – good benefits with positive work place

Cons – short pay and off hours that are inconsistent, plus no two days off together

Advice to Senior Management – increase salaries in job ladder

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Big 5 part-time for less than a year

Pros – Discount on some store items

Cons – Unprepared management.
Impertinent co-workes.
Rude customers.
Hardly no hours scheduled.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't send an employee to a department they know nothing about. It makes the employee look bad and the company as a whole.

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

Current Employee – been working at Big 5

Pros – Great growth opportunity that you can see and look forward to, given your compitence and performance ability.

Cons – schedule is not set and changes weekly

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Big 5

Pros – Great people working with you that share your pain. Management for the most part are very understanding and have a good sense of humor.

Cons – Didnt like the way males had to dress at a sporting goods store. Store is very crowded with sporting goods. Its very unorganized.

Advice to Senior Management – Use Big 5 as a stepping stone. Put in a couple of years and get out. underpaid for their position.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Big 5

Pros – Pretty simple job without much sales knowledge

Cons – Boring job without much growth opportunities. Day in and day out you will be doing the same tasks.

Advice to Senior Management – Make their employees feel more valuable and provide some type of incentive.

Former Employee – worked at Big 5

Pros – Flexible schedule (great for students). Pretty laid back atmosphere. The employee discount was always nice, especially when it came to shoes and clothing. If you're athletic or like sports it's a fun place to work. They're also a fairly conservative store -- I liked the dress code. It's not like SportsAuthority where you wear khakis and a polo. It's shirts and ties for the guys and business casual for the girls.

Cons – I want to start by saying that a lot of this could just be my last Big 5 location and may not necessarily hold true for all Big 5 stores. Mgmt was largely incompetent at my store (I learned more from the mgr of a store in a neighboring city). The mgr was very much a hypocrite and poor at training his asst mgrs and mgmt trainees...It was borderline awful. As a company, Big 5 is kinda behind on the times, but they seem to be catching up (they're doing radio ads in CA and I heard rumors of TV ads). They also now have Twitter and Facebook. Big 5 as a whole is a good company, I'm sad that mgmt at my store was so bad.

Advice to Senior Management – Just keep a closer eye on who you make store managers. Upper mgmt seems very disconnected from people at the store level; it's like they don't understand the store aspect of the company at that level. Corporate seems too afraid to reprimand or fire the bad store managers due to legal ramifications. I fear it's going to end up hurting the company financially.

Former Employee – worked at Big 5

Pros – You get a discount of the lowest price of the year on any given item + an additional 10%
Pretty good about job flexibility of schedule
You get to see the newest athletic shoes and equipment
Some members of management are easy to get along with, some co-workers are great, too.

Cons – Other than the pros mentioned not much else to brag about at Big 5.

Low pay, even for retail. I was given a "top rate" of $9.15 per hour because of my extensive retail experience. If you are hired as a Manager trainee the pay is around $12.50 per hour.

If you are full-time, also a management trainee, you have to pay union dues to the Teamsters and they can be pretty excessive.

It's a slow place to work most of the time unless its in the evenings or on the weekends. If you are working the day shift, expect to do nothing but projects such as putting on new prices on the never-ending over-lapping sales. If you are lucky you might get a fun project such as putting together a piece of exercise equipment or a bike.

It seems easier to be a manager fresh off the street than internally, which makes no sense because if you are a good employee, you should be promoted. Someone off the street can have no experience, but be considered for a management trainee job without seeing the person's work ethics.

Men have to dress in slacks, dress shirts, and ties...a little out of place in a sporting goods store.

Hours although flexible, can be minimal, but if you are on your manager's good side, you shouldn't have an issue about hours.

Advice to Senior Management – Its the 21st Century and since when do ties belong in sporting goods? A more casual atmosphere could help to make the environment a little better for the employees. Especially when time comes to do the project work or take heavy boxes out to customer's cars. Although pay is low, a little more for tenure and knowledge would go along way; maybe a top rate of $10.00 rather. If that is not possible, than some sort of commission would help. Is the union really necessary in a retail job? In my 2 years time there I have not seen the union utilized at all and they just take the massive amounts of dues from the full time employee. Do something about the music, too, it puts most people to sleep!

Former Employee – worked at Big 5

Pros – A good place to learn operations, but they're careful not to reward your performance.

Cons – Worst in class pay schedule.

Advice to Senior Management – Your retention would be great if you didn't think insuring someone's family was the same as paying them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend