Vitamin Shoppe Reviews

Pros

The Vitamin Shoppe expects a lot from its employees, but at the same time gives a lot of proper encouragement as well as direction on making a good employee. It will ask a lot of you, and at times you will feel under paid for what is given, but it is a great place to learn how to act, as well as somewhere to learn intimate customer interaction.

Cons

There is minimal growth potential, and often times it feels that you must be in the right place at the right time to advance.

Advice to Senior Management

The management does well, but I feel it does not look out directly for the employees to advance.

Pros

The amount of products and companies make learning a fun experience. One can learn enormous amounts of information on supplements through this company.

Cons

Poorly paid wages
Incompetent upper management
No support from company as a whole.
Very hard to advance

Advice to Senior Management

Learn that the employees at the store level are your face, your voice, and your connection to your customers; without them you have no business. Hiring knowledge employees, and paying them fair wages will increase your business tenfold.

Pros

Healthy living and lifestyle, good staff and team, many geat customers, opportunity to learn products and knowledge, succession opportunities for associates, keyholders and assistant managers.

Cons

no opportunity for Store Managers to grow, no sucession plans for managers, positions filled from outside. Managers rarely given any oportunity to apply or interview for promotions. Annual bonus criteria not equal for all store managers. Micro managed. Pay very low for all. Payroll hours way to low for expectations. Managers must complete employee reviews on sales floor when store is open. Hiring difficult due to low wages and companies expectations.

Advice to Senior Management

Implement sucession plan for managers. Annual bonus should be available to all managers based on fair criterias, lower volume stores currently are not elegible. Bay Area Store Manager turnover almost 100% in last two years. Why have so many long time managers left the company recently? Managers have no voice. Once you speak out, you are the next target. No care about quality of employees life.

Pros

Great salary (which is negotiable)
Great staff (for the most part)
Flexible scheduling

Cons

Almost no communication with Regional Management and above.
My District Manager assembled a team of store managers (including myself) that quickly became the #1 district in the company! Yet issues (which still arent clear) came up that led to my resignation and the wrongful termination of another SUPER STAR Store Manager and the District Manager. Lets just say that district and the stores are not the leaders anymore.

Advice to Senior Management

LISTEN to your DM's and Store Managers. We deal with the issues first hand, daily, and KNOW what needs to be done for the continued growth of the company.

Pros

Vitamin Shoppe offers a 25% discount on purchased items to its employees.
The newer stores are attractive and pleasant, every effort is apparently made to make customers happy and comfortable. The product selection is comprehensive and there are periodic sales and other incentives to attract new consumers.

Cons

Despite the company's apparent "consumer focus" facade (really, shareholder focused at the expense of everything else), the people on the front lines who actually make the difference for the customer (and, ultimately, the shareholder) are devalued and overloaded with make-work "rollouts" that are introduced and discarded as the company's disconnected administration (most of the new regime, like the old regime, know very little about supplements and even less about day-to-day store operations from firsthand) struggles to find a functioning identity. Their shareholder value is through the roof, because the employees are sacrificed for it.

This will work for the time being and the company will eventually become a victim of its own errors, long after shares have been bought and sold, and those in the know have gotten away easy. It's a cold world, yes.

Salaries in the Northeast were apparently slashed a few years ago by a regional manager who doesn't value employees. Qualified people leave as soon as they get over the shock of realizing how little this company cares about them. Corporate greed knows no season, even in an industry supposedly related to well-being.

Even at the Health Enthusiast level, most interviewees never call back after the salary offer, especially since the salary for a Health Enthusiast is 20 percent below that of most grocery cashiers - and that Health Enthusiast is expected to wash floors and windows, clean and stock shelves daily AND pass three levels of "Vitamin Shoppe University" training on the store's 20,000+ products, including enforced and tightening DSHEA regulatory standards, marketing to consumers whose predominant attitude is that of mistrust.
Once the three VSU levels are passed with a 15 to 25 cent per hour raise per level, there are no incentives beyond annual reviews with at most a 25 cent raise - and these are frowned upon, only given for work far beyond the exceptional.

The "Peter Principle" operates here most strongly, especially in management (employees rise to a level of incompetency, then stay there), where there is more than usual cronyism and "covering for each other".
The company's "ivory tower" management (local and administrative) cares absolutely nothing for employee satisfaction, feigns ignorance and dominates through fear. Older employees seem to have "Teflon".

There is a sharp contrast between the "spared no expense" decor and required "look" of the salespersons and their actual circumstances, which are below standard as far as employee support and remuneration.
Most individuals would find this disheartening. This is no picnic. If you're desperate, fine, take the job if no other options exist. When you're able to leave, you will, or you'll hate yourself for staying.

Advice to Senior Management

LOOK AT COMPENSATION, REALLY (including the new "enhanced" insurance, which is a perfect example..."enhanced" at the expense of the employee, with higher premiums AND higher co-pays!)
"Secret-shop" your stores and your regional management... Metrics at the expense of people?? MAKE THE PAY MAKE SENSE FOR LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD. Weed out the dead wood, managers who are sucking up the big pay but delivering nothing but lip service at the expense of the employee (but then you'll have to pay real salaries in order to attract people who can actually afford to work for Vitamin Shoppe, right?). CONNECT.
Get your head out of Shareholder Nirvana and start paying attention to the people who are driving your business, or you will lose it to attrition (that's expensive, right?) and poor performance from the "temps" who stay only as long as absolutely necessary.
But you don't care anyway, do you?

Pros

- No real sales pressure
- Higher traffic than competition
- Okay benefits
- Lots of products to choose from, mores than competitors

Cons

Oh man. Try to bear with me here, as I have a novel to write.

I've worked for other health retailers. I won't name them. You can probably guess. Vitamin Shoppe always seemed like THE job to get in health retail. Barely any sales goals. Faster-paced atmosphere. An endless assortment of supplements, way more variety than competitors. Opportunity to build a team and work more closely with peers. Sounds great right? Eh, maybe not. It's a mirage. For what Vitamin Shoppe excels in, they bomb everywhere else.

Perhaps it was the region I worked in, I don't know. But I was micromanaged to the core - even down to my physical appearance. I know what you're thinking! That I am a blimp, right? That would actually be somewhat understandable (health retail, after all). But I'm in excellent shape, so it had nothing to do with that. I'll let your imagination run wild as to what concerns (plural) about my looks were bizarrely brought up and quickly put to rest after I brazenly said how ridiculous they sounded. It happened to some other employees as well. Just an isolated incident, maybe. For Vitamin Shoppe's sake, I really hope so.

You expect a certain amount of pedantic nonsense in retail, but this was a different universe entirely. District Management enforced the most bloated, unnecessary methods of executing the simplest of tasks, to the point where I wondered if I was being Punk'd. The amount of paperwork this company wants stores to keep track of is so backward. Did you sign off on whether you turned on the registers for the day? Ooh, make sure you do, otherwise you're in trouble. Gee, you'd think that if the d*mn store was open all day and we pulled in $5000, it would kind of be a no brainer. Miss a signature on the redundant Daily Planner? Expect to be made to feel like an idiot for not executing the "Branded Customer Experience," because it ALL GOES BACK TO THAT. Yes. I wish I was joking.

As for the pay. Retail isn't the place to go if you want to earn an amazing hourly wage, so Vitamin Shoppe's relative cheapness in terms of pay never surprised me. Assistant Manager pay ranges from $11-14 an hour, depending on your experience. Fair game. What surprised me was the hilarious salary Store Managers earned. Getting paid 35 grand to run a 2 million dollar store is a JOKE. Be prepared to work up to 50-60 hours if you're in a busy location. Calculate that hourly wage for me real quick.

Sales associates earn minimum wage, but I'll tell you right now - you're not just bagging people's vitamins as an associate. Much more is expected. And like everywhere else, Assistant Management is that awkward place between wanting advancement, and yet being thoroughly pleased you're dodging the spotlight. That is, unless you go without a store manager for a few months like I did. That's when upper management at Vitamin Shoppe really rears its ugly head.

The company seems to want to be a vitamin/supplement version of a CVS, and that's where they go TOTALLY WRONG. People aren't buying NyQuil and Listerine here, they are buying DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS. They need a certain amount of guidance - and Vitamin Shoppe will tell you to provide it, but you can't. The company can't train their managers & employees to provide good customer service when they are expecting them to spend all their time wrapped up in tasking, rushing to putting up mammoth shipments in fear of not getting 150 cases off the sales floor in 8 hours. Newsflash - it's not easy to do this 100% perfect, twice a week, with a team of 2-3. Keep in mind, most Vitamin Shoppe stores have a lot of foot traffic. Enjoy tagging and retagging for no reason WHATSOEVER, wasting time preparing daily planners, "sales meetings" (won't even bother getting into that), and Monday Manager Meetings (ditto) that serve squat. There's really no need for it. If one is trained properly, one knows what the hell they need to do when they show up to work. Period.

Because of this backwards philosophy, employees and managers grow to resent customers, seeing them as interruptions to their tasking, when all customers want is for the someone to help them pick out some good products. That's what employees SHOULD be doing, and that's what Vitamin Shoppe "says" they want them to do, but it doesn't happen.

Associates are constantly angry and disgruntled, feeling they do the equal work of an assistant (and sometimes Store Manager) for a fraction of the pay. Your dress code makes you look like a waiter at Ruby Tuesdays. At times, workplace politics made me feel like I was in an episode of Ally McBeal - but again, that may have just been the location I worked at.

As for store management; store managers are constantly stressed and exhausted - the higher volume the store, the more the store manager's life becomes synonymous with that store. Sound dramatic? It's true. It's I worked for a store manager who worked upwards of 60 hours per week, and it was never enough. He had 2 assistants (me and someone else), 4 additional employees, and we still always seemed to fall short of our idiotic tasking expectations. Nothing we did ever cut it for upper management. I swear he probably aged 10 years in the 3 months I worked with him. Doesn't exactly inspire an assistant manager to want their own store, now does it? Not sure how it works in lower volume Vitamin Shoppe stores - best I can say is that they simply have all the time in the world to waste on their expected duties instead of educating themselves on what really matters - the products and connecting with the customer. Anyway, my manager quit about 3 months after hiring me, fed up with the insane micromanagement and expectations placed on him. I won't get into how unprofessionally he was treated after his resignation - or how unprofessionally I was treated after MINE, because it's pointless to crybaby about. One shouldn't be surprised by stupid behavior in retail.

3 months later, I followed suit. Where did I go? Back to management at old stomping grounds; a competitor with a controversial reputation, and just as many downfalls as Vitamin Shoppe. Retail = retail. Despite that, however, it boasts a vastly more realistic outlook on customer service, plus a no-nonsense approach to operating a business, and THAT alone can make the most nauseating job seem digestible.

It may have been the upper management in the district I worked for, because before I was hired for this company, I read reviews on this very website and they didn't seem any worse than any retail chain. Perhaps it isn't any worse. Perhaps elsewhere in this state, and in the country, Vitamin Shoppe is a passable place to work for. Sadly, I'm pretty sure what I experienced here is likely to be the future of Vitamin Shoppe nationwide. Employees of competitors, don't be so quick to assume it's the answer to your problems... take your time, do your research before you take the plunge! Or hell, get out of retail altogether!

Advice to Senior Management

You're so focused on trying to be different from your competition, that you lose sight of what you really are. You're not Walgreens. You're not Whole Foods. You're a specialty retailer. There is way too much potential and creativity in this industry for you to be acting like the Wal-Mart of vitamin chains. Customers want knowledgable employees, not cashiers. The Vitamin Shoppe University is a great start - but with all the tasking and daily paperwork you want managers and associates to regurgitate over and over, it's irrelevant. Offer your employees some incentives. It WILL motivate them to do their jobs better. Stop acting like you're above it.

Oh, and stop investing money into things that do little for sales, and try working on your brand a little bit - it's dwarfed by your competition simply because no thought or money is invested into making it appealing or original.

Pros

You can learn a lot about the health field and you're constantly learning something new. Employee discount is decent.

Cons

Where do I even begin? Company wants Harvard graduates but wants to pay low wages. They cut hours like crazy and expect PT workers to stick around. I worked my butt off, came in on days off, worked 12 hour shifts because that's what managers are supposed to do but you never get any "thank you's" or "good job"... it's always "You did this and that wrong". I'm not one that needs a constant pat on the back by any means but a "you're doing a great job" every once in a while would have been nice. I don't think I was ever that unhappy in my whole life. I was a great ASM and my PT employees loved me but I had a horrible SM and an even WORSE DM.

Interview process is RIDICULOUS and so are they questions they want you to ask. Then DM has to approve almost all new hires. What's the point of having an SM if you can't trust them to make a professional decision?

DSM's and DPC's are a complete waste of time and take FOREVER to do.

Rules constantly change and were never consistent! I am a hard worker but the work load is excessive at times and they definitely need a different system for their Daily Media BS.

Long story short you'll probably be happier working at Wal Mart.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a better POS for one. Having to void a sale every time you hit F3 for check on accident is STUPID. You should be able to just hit escape or something.

Listen to your employees... I can guarantee more than half of them are unhappy.

Pros

My job at the Vitamin Shoppe fits perfectly with my lifestyle and offers a fair compensation and plenty of opportunity for growth.

Cons

Starting off as a sales associate is rough; the pay is competitive when compared to the same job elsewhere, but not enough to serve as your only job unless you are a student who lives with parents or has another form of income.

Advice to Senior Management

This company is strong because it is different. Every store is run like a family business (in terms of the pride that employees take in their work), and the relationship between store management and upper management is similarly familial. So long as this sense of teamwork stays strong, this company will continue to succeed.

Pros

If you like to have some balance in your life, shifts are fair.

Cons

Upper management make up rules as they go along. Nothing makes sense. Projects and rules change all the time. Too many chiefs and not enough indians in this company. Communcation between store level and corporate is awful. A 5 year old could do better. It's embarrassing. If something goes wrong in the company, they always blame store level. Corporate has no sense of what it is truly like down at store level. Alot of busy work. Takes away customer service. Plus , the company is lazy, They expect stores to do their own marketing. All these jobs to do with very little pay.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to what an everyday is really like at store level

Pros

The training at the Vitamin Shoppe is the best I have seen anywhere. The benefits are wonderful for full-time, and I was surprised to see they had a fairly comprehensive part-time package, as well.

Being able to really help people is a huge plus, though it can be challenging. Definitely a great place to work if you want to develop service skills and learn how to adapt.

Cons

Management is generally not great in my district, and no one higher up is really very honest or open with you. They have a tendency to force people to quit instead of firing them, and they are all about development plans to address issues, which I believe to be very ineffective.

The base pay for part-time employees is sad, considering all you are required to do.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be great to see management really listening to their teams, and connecting with them, instead of existing in their happy-positive environment, which never got anything done. I understand the theory behind their methods, but the way they employ them could use a lot of work.