Family Video Reviews

Pros

The goals of the company are to promote customer service above all else. This means that you (the employee) are empowered to make decisions on your own without a hovering manager.

You are considered trustworthy.

There is a difficult hiring process for a reason! We move at the speed of light sometimes and you have to be able to keep up and keep a smile on your face. We have some of the greatest people in the world working here.

Cons

You will have the occasional terrible manager who does not quite understand the idea of empowerment (even though it is in all of your literature the first day of work). This can be rather frustrating.

You will be moving at the speed of light. You will get stressed.

Sometimes you'll have to run the entire store by yourself. Again, you will stress. You will have to keep smiling as though it does not bother you and keep the strain out of your voice.

If you close, you will most likely be closing alone past midnight. A young (or even older) female may have more issues with this than a male.

Advice to Senior Management

I would advise lower management especially to consider the way they talk to their employees and I would advise the district management to make sure that they are welcoming when they ask if anything is going on. Also, I would have them consider that perhaps when an employee asks a question about a new manager, there may be a reason and snapping is possibly not the best idea. We are supposed to hire friendly people, but somehow along the way, the management seems to lose their friendliness--at least towards their employees. Perhaps a little more kindness, respect, and general politeness would be encouraged. Although we are not personally giving the company money, we are making money by being there and helping customers. Just a thought.

Pros

Family video is a fun place work with the benefits of free movies and such if you work hard enough. The pay is usually pretty good to start off with sales commission also.

Cons

It is very difficult to recieve a raise and they dont give very much credit for the hard work. Especially hard work days without any breaks.

Advice to Senior Management

Better pay for shift leader positions especially ones where you work by yourself for the entire night. Give more compensation to workers

Pros

The customers always make my day. There's a few sticklers, but a few make it worth my time.

Cons

Never get enough hours, even when you've gone above and beyond for them. I've always experienced a 10 hour gap between the hours I was getting to the next person. Also, employees are notorious for not doing their job and not tending to customers. Oh, and family does not come before Family Video.

Pros

Great corporate management, good part-time job, good full-time job IF you don't have a family to feed. Your experience with the company is going to depend on two factors; district & regional managers. Good communication from corporate.

Cons

low pay for what all Is involved. They expect you to be a slave to the store for about 30,000 and 30,000 is if your a good manager. I quote a manager "its like pulling teeth trying to get a raise". Long hours, sometimes open to close shifts. 8, 10, 12, or even 14 hrs shifts with no break. Will try to take advantage of employees if given the chance in some instances ie, making MIT's or asistant managers run stores for extended periods of time, because a manager has quit for no additional pay. On-call shifts are horrible, specially around holidays. Milelage for driving to other store locations is very minimal, and if your a part-timer its going to take about a month or more to get paid back on that. I have witnessed on more than one occassion in which managers with more than a couple years of experiece treated like red-head kids when they have put in notice to quit the company. Not going to lie to you, to work for this company, you have to look out for yourself and measure if certain situations will benefit yourself, because I have seen people taken advantage of.

Advice to Senior Management

Go back to corporate roots and values, by taking care of your people. Make sure you have regional, district, and store managers that have that quality as well. I loved the philosophy of corporate management, but its being lost down the lines of communication worrying too much about "the numbers".

Pros

Easy, and if you just need a couple weeks/months of work by all means apply and get hired. Otherwise, steer clear if you are enticed by their sign saying they are hiring and are looking for a real career. Won't even exist by the end of the decade and then you will be in your 30s or 40s with movie store manager as your only experience, meanwhile you will have no money saved because they pay less than $30k a year in salary.

Cons

No breaks
No sick days
On call shifts that ruin your whole day and you may only end up working an hour of a 8 hour shift.Getting pushed back hours after you are supposed to start or being let go hours before you are supposed to end
Travel to other stores is required but no compensation is given
Embarrassing to put on a resume or even just in general to tell a stranger you work here
Overtime is an impossibility but they have no problem making you work off the clock, very questionable if half the stuff is legal.
Movie business has NO FAITH in movie stores and no longer sends new movies to movie stores. Managers have to purchase all 30-40 copies of new releases from a store, meanwhile it is all on their dime and is not counted towards the 44 hrs a week you have to work. This is EVERY week and will only get worse.

No respect for the employees and store managers from the company. Basically this is a warning that they advertise it as a great career opportunity when it is not. In reality if you are the type of person that would succeed at this job and earn your couple hundred dollar bonus (oh boy!) a month you should pursue other options. You will be running your own store for no pay when you might as well start your own business or if you are a person to "drink the punch" as they say, then you might as well drink it at a real corporation that pays grown-up money.

Advice to Senior Management

This place is a joke, and as you can see with Redbox, no management is needed to rent videos. Once all the old people die and high speed internet is readily available everywhere there will be no customers left.

Pros

Family Video allows managers to manage for the most part. You do feel a sense of teamwork with your fellow employees. This was a great jog for an 18 year old kid who loved movies and didn't mind working until midnight.

Cons

Regional Managers are basically headhunters. The brick-and-mortar video store is a dying business model. I really don't know how much longer Family Video will be able to compete with Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc.

Pros

Fun and energetic employees. Free movies and video games (as manager).

Cons

long shifts with no breaks! They staff a store with one person, so you can't even go to the rest room. absolutely no lunch breaks. My Dm told me to eat in between customers. A joke. They will tell you about how far you can grow in the company, but the salaries for managers and DMs are an absolute joke.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay your employees better wages and we might stick around. Don't act surprised when we leave if you pay poverty wages.

Pros

You get to meet a lot of great people, some of the staff and customers the come into the store really become important to you.

You get to see some of the movies before they go out onto the floor, that is if you can ever find the time to watch them.

Managers get free rentals and employees get half off rentals. If you can ever find the time to rent anything.

Great job to have as a part time/college job. NOT a career move.

Cons

Long hours. Managers work upwards of 60 hours a week, every week. Managers have to work a minimum of 44 "open" hours each week. That means hours that the store is actually open. The hour you have to come in before they open and the hour you have to stay after they close each night don't count towards that 44 hours.

Managers schedules must be pre-approved by the District Manager, your schedule only shows you working 44 hours each week, but the District Manager requires you to come in before your shift starts, leave long after your shift ends, and come in on days that you are scheduled off.

Managers have to work minimum of 8 hour shifts on Friday and Saturdays, Saturdays and Sundays, or Fridays and Sundays to include the hours of 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. You can only have one weekend off a month. Managers must close, working until at least 1 a.m., a minimum of 1 night per week.

They do not care if you have a family, Managers are required to work minimum of 8 hour shifts on ALL holidays. Christmas Eve and Day, Thanksgiving, New Years Eve and Day, Easter, Fourth of July,
etc.

You don't have anywhere to sit down. You are on your feet from the minute you walk in the door until the minute you leave, working upwards of 14 to 15 hour shifts with no breaks.

You are constantly told to make the customer first, but when you do that by helping the customer you are then wrote up or reprimanded for not doing the paperwork/shelf stocking/etc that you were doing when the customer needed help.

You are constantly told, if you don't do this, or if you do that, you will be fired. Every day your job is on the line. No matter how good your work is, no matter how great the customer compliments, now matter how many hours you put in, its never enough.

There is no such thing as positive feedback in this company.

They lie. To the customers, to the staff, to everyone. Specific questions asked in the interview, were lies. Pay raises promised after promotions, were never followed through on.

They have recently started requiring Managers to go to 24 hour stores such as Walmart and Payless to purchase New Release movies at Midnight because studios will no longer send them the movies.

Managers are required to carry large amounts of cash off the clock to purchase these movies, then go to their stores after midnight in order to process and put the movies out for rental. Corporate is not concerned for the safety/security of their managers while doing these purchases. This is approximately 4 hours of extra work that Managers are not allowed to be clocked in for that they are required to do every week, sometimes twice a week.

Advice to Senior Management

Follow through on your words. Be honest, don't tell people in their interviews things that you know are not true, half-truths, or mislead people into believing lies.

If you really care about your customers, staff your stores appropriately, don't put so much weight on your managers shoulders without at least supporting them or paying them better.

Stop forcing your managers to complete movie buys from other retailers. They are illegal and pose a serious security threat to the people you are forcing to complete them.

Pros

You get a percentage of your stores sales as part of your pay check and also get sales commissions based on add ons at the register.

Cons

They advertise 30-35k for managers but really pay 25k and the other 5k comes from commision from your store and sales which is not guaranteed to be 5k per year.

Advice to Senior Management

If you want to attract managers for all of the stores that are opening you need to pay them well. We are required to do inventories, accounting, customer service, receiving, shipping, cleaning, building and equipment maintenance, sales, and on and on. Everything that can be done is required for us to do but you don't pay like it.

Pros

Pay + bonuses, fun, opportunity to see the latest movies for free, operate in "grey" area, not black and white, empowerment, opportunity for advancement

Cons

No breaks, questionable hiring practices, lack of communication from senior management, open 365 days (no time off for holidays for part timers), customers never happy, no "sick" days

Advice to Senior Management

Get on the same page with your employees - mixed feedback from district to regional to auditor. Be consistent and honest with your feedback!