Movie Gallery Reviews

Pros

Started out as a great place to work Ended up as my worse nightmare. Movie Gallery was an up and coming company with great potential

Cons

DM's are a joke. RM's are even worse. It use to e all about the customer (good thing) Now it's all abut the almighty dollar. They don't care one iota about your customers only about how many dollars they can squeeze out of them. No wonder this company has crashed and burned!

Advice to Senior Management

You people have ruined a long time great rapport business with lots of loyal customers with your stupid powerplay program. You should have stayed with discount rental card deals and the other used sales you had before powerplay and they buy out of Hollywood. As far as I'm concerned, that was your biggest error. We were a totally solvent company prior to that aquisistion. Stupid, stupid move on your part. You killed a perfectly fine company by getting greedy. JERKS!

Pros

Met a lot of great people. Was fun for a good bit of time.

Cons

All the upper management looks at is Power Play and core. There are other ways to make money, concessions, movies for sale UPT's is what should be looked at over all, not one thing.
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Advice to Senior Management

Quit getting rid of great people over power play. Realize that if a store is making money the manager must be doing something right.

Pros

Free video rentals ,big deal -

Cons

A District manager once said - if i dont like a manager personally, i find a reason to get rid of them.
lame tactics to improve revenue like rental insurance and rental plans instead of focusing on the obvious- rental buys, happy employees make happy customers. MG let district managers run amock with unprofessional behaviors and scare tactics.

Advice to Senior Management

Your business decisions have always been horrendous. You could care less about the people that work in the stores. Carpets havent been cleaned in years. Light fixtures are burnt out - supplies not available to run a business properly.

Pros

It was a great gig while it lasted, free rentals, fairly decent health insurance. In the beginning, six years ago, it was like a family. Not the hardest job, but challenging enough to make it interesting.

Cons

where to begin....Underappreciated, underpaid, and just generally going under. Six district managers, four regional managers, ungodly turnover. Having to work every single holiday wasn't cool either. Not being allowed to take vacation at a time when all families get together. And the biggest failure of all....powerplay. WE all got played right into the ground. this was the poorest managed company I have ever seen. Thanks upper management for losing us our jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

IT is waaay too late for feedback, stores are closing left and right. I will be shocked and suprised if there are any stores at all left in a few months, but if there are, stop powerplay, treat your employees like worthwhile people, and def. be more customer friendly, quit trying to bug people to death.

Pros

The pay wasn't much, and the company is fairly incompetent from the bottom up, but the work wasn't difficult. A good job if you are going to school

Cons

Very low pay. No communication from upper management. Silly corporate initiatives. Lack of flexibility towards different ideas. Not very professional

Advice to Senior Management

I would say to try and find out what works and doesn't work within each different store location and allow for some leeway to try and drive sales initiatives.

Pros

There are quite a few reasons that I have worked for the company so long. Even though I could have taken a hirer paying position with another company. Working with my peers for the time that I have been with this company, Every store manager bringing their own personality to the store, learning from their experiences as well as the day to day interaction with our customer base.. The company have some very good benefits to offer their management team, as well as offering insurance to part time associate. The flexible hours, not that same old 9 to 5 job. I love the whole customer service aspect of the job. And when you have been in a store for a couple years you know you customers by name when they come in, about their families, their likes and dislikes.
You can have three rentals out on your employee account at all times. You have abilitly to rent the new movies before they are even out.

Cons

Many of our locations are closing, along with the closings of stores that closed their doors a couple of years ago. Although being able to stay at 7% or above in selling our Monthly rental packages is acheivable in some areas. in areas where the unemployment is running high those
customer are lucky to be able to walk in a rent a couple of movies a month. Movie Gallery raises/bonuses are almost a thing of the past. Management can only work a max of 45 hours a week, any thing over that (whether it sunday night you opened your at 45 hours at 5pm and no replacement can be found. At that point, you can loose your job one of two ways, close your store and go over on hours or lock the door and go home both for which is cause for you to be immediately terminated. In the past 7-8 eight years I have managed 4 different store, in three different towns all about 45 minutes from my home. Their is no severence pay for those associates who have been loyal to this company and are suddenly out of a job. We have district managers/store managers/associates who are hired up and get a very limited amount of training hours. And then they're throwed out there on their own, we are just sitting them up for failure. And with it being against company policy for an associate to work off the clock, and store managers only being allowed to work a max of 45 hours a week, makes it to train these associate to do all the aspects of their position and tend to customers And so many people don't want to have their packages auto debited, and with stores closing within 25-30 minutes of my store makes the customers a little more hesitate to give 3 months in advance.

Advice to Senior Management

I think that communications between stores and the corporate office should be more timely.

Coupon codes should be in the store system on the day that the changes take effect, so that associates are not manually crediting off the discounts offered. And to hold those associates accountable for the something that is beyond their control is unacceptable behavior on the
corporate operations level. We had our associates sign that they will do their part to reduce our manual discounting. And then we don't get the proper codes to work with, what do you do? Give it to them manually because that is what the current promotion that is advertised inside the store and on our website.
And if the powerplay was offered on a monthly cash options, it would honestly be more dependable
then setting up auto draft, too many glitches with it. People get drafted, bring in their bank statements to prove it and the powerplay isn't showing up so again we must credit it off. Or they are drafted even after their powerplay is canceled months before. And the peoples who accounts are drafted twice in once month.
The unlimited monthly rental package is killing the company. A customer spends $40 a month for as many rentals as they can watch, some customers returning more than once a day. Is that guaranteed $40 a month really worth giving our business away.

Pros

Free rentals, co workers and the fact I won almost every competition, can you say BONUSES

Cons

One night my DM called to let me know they would be there the next day to pack up all my inventory. I was out of a job. 3 Years with the company, Ranked #1 in Powerplay for the district and the region for the fourth quarter. Had a spotless store, and went out of my way to help new store managers clean there stores and get them up to MG standards.
A month later and I have still not heard from my DM they have not returned any of my cals or e-mails. To think I was the #1 store manager for the thing the company wanted to succed in most - powerplay (30-40% weekly for the store). Now I'm out of a job and there are plenty of stores in my district alone that could use my expertise. The most frusterating thing - my DM won't call me back.
Point being, Movie Gallery really doesn't care about their employees or unfortunetly their customers. Think of how many people that had signed up for powerplay in my store alone that lost that money. It's not good business.

Advice to Senior Management

You know in advance that stores will be having an "emergency closing". You need to let the staff and customers know in advance. The staff at the store level are the ones dealing with the customers selling them packages (powerplay),. and now we look like the ones who screwed them. People talk and it's not looking good for your powerplay or your business.

Pros

-You get to rent free movies
-You get a discount on all concessions
-They're pretty good about giving you time off if you need it

Cons

I've been with the company for almost a year now, and when I first started my job I loved it. I loved the customers, my coworkers, and my boss was amazing! But recently its just been one thing after another. I feel like Movie Gallery has become too "numbers" focused, they're worried about how many power plays someone has, yet they haven't even worked out all the bugs in their system. They no longer care about the "customer service". Like I said I used to enjoy my job, but now it just seems like with all the glitches in their system, and upper management not really caring about what's going on under them, then trying to keep your customers happy is a lost cause. I love my boss, she is absolutely amazing, she's great about giving time off and if you work and pull your weight she doesn't mind giving you the hours she has available. But I know that she's just as stressed out as we are, if not more! Movie Gallery needs to get on the ball.

Advice to Senior Management

Realize that your customers come FIRST, offer customer appreciation days to say "hey yeah there's a lot of stores closing, but we're still open, and it's because of you!!", get your tech support center up and running, customers don't want to call about powerplay problems just to sit on hold for an hour. Treat your employees like they're real people, not just numbers or initials. Stay on top of stuff, like getting alarm codes, and getting stuff fixed. Understand that even though you have a 0-10 for Powerplay, doesn't mean you didn't try your hardest to sell it!

Pros

Free rentals, discounts on pop/candy, able to request time off, flexible schedules, close proximity to my home. Enjoy working with regular customers and talking about movies.

Cons

Difficult/impossible sales goals, no communication, what basically feels like busy work - rearranging our movie sections every other month for no good reason. From Powerplay to the Discount Rental Card, we can try hard to sell the promotions, but this past Powerplay push was too much. My store is in a lower income neighborhood and doesn't have the money to pay for something like that every month - but our store still managed to pull huge numbers.

Advice to Senior Management

Just lower the price of rentals in general or bring back good rental combos. People are just there to rent a movie, not sign up for some ridiculous plan. People have enough stress in their lives without worrying if that $25 Powerplay plan at the video store is going to overdraft their debit card.

Pros

Free rentals and generally the people at the DM and store level are good people trying to make a living.

Cons

The company has no consistency the turnover is absurd. The amount of talented District Managers, Store Managers, and associates that have been terminated is a joke and it's no wonder this company is going back into bankruptcy and closing stores.

Advice to Senior Management

No advice would work because upper management is too stupid to listen. I guess give it up because B&M video stores are done.