Harbor Freight Tools Employee Reviews about "pay"

Pros

The good things about working here was that the pay as a cashier was above the average minimum wage.

Cons

Some cons about working here were the lack of leadership and just workers being everywhere.

Pros

Great atmosphere and excellent opportunities for training and advancement. This company makes it easy to serve customers and gives the employees the freedom to do what is needed to keep customers happy.

Cons

The pay rate is low and while there are lots of programs available to earn spiffs and bonuses. The standard wage is not a living wage even in the lowest cost of living environments.

Pros

PTO builds very quick. If you want to physically hurt ever day you go home because of the slave labor and save the cost on a gym membership.

Cons

Pay for work is very low compared to most employers in my area resulting in very low skilled applicants. Company will tell you its close but this is not true just look on your state labor site.. If you try and contact the corporate departments for the registers going down 95% of the time you will have to wait over a hour to even speak to someone resulting in a huge loss of sales and hindering customer service. Even if you have another problem and you try and contact corporate you almost never get a response and when you do they act like your bugging them. Very low level customer service, we were wrote up if we were engaging with the customer rather then just point 'its over there' this was told to me at my interview with the DM and I couldn't believe it. Store manager style was very threating even if you were well above the company goal in the exceptional range for all metrics under your job description you were told daily its not good enough. Very out for yourself atmosphere, almost no communication or weekly meetings with other management. Sales manager training staff to consistently reuse coupons to drive ESP and ITC numbers, approved by SM.

Pros

The benefits for your family are outstanding, and there are many locations in Ventura County to work in. Great job for a graduated student.

Cons

Yearly pay increases of less than a dollar even with an incredible year of effort. Little advancement if you do not have an education. Older operating systems that need to be up to date.

Pros

The pay rate is decent when you factor in the commission you get off of selling in-store member ships and extended service plans. Managers are very driven when it comes to the store and its appearance. Daily interaction with store manager and what is expected of all employees. Opportunities for advancement immediately if you're a hard worker and have a good attitude.

Cons

The Point of Sale program is below average, item look up and product numbers are in a separate program as well so expect to bounce between the two all day wasting everyone's time. One cash register was open at my location out of four, lines would get long and back up cashiers were always slow in coming, even with a radio. Basically everyone else's time is more important than yours. First check took two months to get, same with the last check. Not enough floor personnel. Had to leave register when there was a line to help the customer being checked out daily. Too stressful, even for retail.

Pros

The pay is good and the monthly bonuses are a plus but inconsistent at best. Most of the hourly associates are good workers.

Cons

LP is a joke and the District managers micro-manage everyone including the store managers. The communication skills from district managers to store managers to the assistant managers might as well be non-existent. Hours are all over the place; you never know what to expect from week to week. They expect 80 hrs of work to be done within 40.

Pros

Job Security... the pay for entry level Management is one of the highest in the Distribution Center Field. Pay for performance based company. You get out of it what you're willing to put in.

Cons

Weekend work is not compensated for Management. In some departments Managers are spread to thin. Too much repeat hiring from dismissed temporary employees.

Pros

The crew is very laid back in terms of office banter and getting along. As a pro it makes the environment a little less stuffy when you can joke and get along with your co-workers - The dress code is pants or shorts, your HFT shirt and your name badge visible at all times (no jacket covering). You are only unable to wear sweats and open toed shoes or flats - The cashiers are capable of making decent pay by selling ESP's/ Warranties and memberships. We have a handful of cashiers who when you compile their hours against their commissions they are making nearly $10.00 plus per hour and that's basing it on the assumption they are still only basing at the starting pay of $8.00 per hour. See below for how it's a con for others. - The S.O.P.s the company has created are very functional IF everything is set up and accommodated properly. See cons below.

Cons

That laid back crew is also a negative when it becomes so laid back that no sense of urgency or responsibility is had. Some crew doesn't take their job seriously enough to put effort into completing day to day tasks either fully or accurately, and why should they, there is no accountability for them. Instead the beatings get handed down to the assistants and the supervisors that are over the lazy staff such as the back room supervisors or the head cashiers as if either of those latter positions have any control over the hiring, scheduling or staffing in the store. When they attempt to hand down a write up, reprimand or talk to any employees about their work ethic, 9/10 times it's dismissed or undermined by the upper management in the store unless the store manager hates that particular person they are trying to discipline, then they will go for blood, otherwise, no accountability to the nuts and bolts of the crew. - This unprofessional laid back attitude goes all the way up the ranks into the manager's office where the store manager will sit and bad mouth the staff to not only other management, but to the peers of the people being talked bad about. I.e. badmouthing and making fun of a cashier to another cashier. - In the store I come from the store manager seems more interested in the inappropriate relationship they are having with an employee (the whole store is aware of it but too fearful for their job to speak up), than they are with doing everything in their power to make their store successful. A great amount of effort has gone into promoting and defending this employee from termination (how can one person miss less work and get fired for attendance while this person misses more work and more regularly but their job is still safe?), while the store falls below expectation, and rather than put that amount of effort into trying to fix what's wrong like scheduling enough people to follow s.o.p. even if it requires a little more front line work from them to accommodate it, the store manager would rather throw every human shield they can in front of them casting all blame on others rather than acknowledging scheduling and staffing issues and trying to fix what they can and defending their staff from problematic issues that are outside their control. Again every staff member is aware of this and just too afraid to address it because we've all seen people come and go who have spoken up about concerns in the store. HR has done little to make anyone feel safe from retaliation and the D.M. has done nothing more than refute every concern mentioned to them leaving most looking for a different job and turn over in the store high. - As I said about warranties for the cashier it's a plus. This is a plus to the cashiers but not the floor crew who spends most of our week working either overnight or doing the Merch S.O.P. process which has us work mostly off hours and 90% of our day in the back room at that, leaving little to no opportunity for us to talk to a customer about warranties or memberships. Most of the floor crew interaction with customers in my store comes from pages by the cashiers to bring an item to the front from the back room. While the floor crew is doing that, the cashier rings up the transaction and sells the warranty. This leads to insane levels of frustration for the floor crew because we not only have to get the product out of it's crammed corner seeing as how the stock room is way undersized for the amount of freight we get, but it's usually heavy and we have no help and we have to take it and load it for the customer with no help. This is all while we make the same starting pay of $8.00 per hour and the cashier stands at the front raking in commissions off our back breaking physical labor. It's very demoralizing to the crew and even when addressed with management we get feedback of little to no rat's butt given about it. We even get notes on the board to pick it up when we aren't contributing enough to those areas of sales as if it's possible to do. The only floor crew that ever gets a warranty sale in my store gets it 98% of the time while acting as a back up cashier, not from customer service from the sales floor. - The entire Merchandising S.O.P. is good on paper. It works well for a model store. One with the proper layout in the back room, the proper tools for the process, adequate space in the back room to execute the process and adequate space to store back stock properly per the S.O.P. Unfortunately there is no variance to the process to accommodate any one variable being wrong. In my store we don't have all the tools we need such as enough rollers, our back room is not laid out in a manner that accommodates unloading per S.O.P. and the size of the back room is so limited that utilizing the secondary unloading process is impossible because by the time you take the pallets out of the truck, there is little to no room to move about the back room. The S.O.P. calls for extra bays to be open for fluctuation in section back stock, where as we don't even have enough bays to accommodate all locations, sharing one bay between two different sections and all bays being typically packed full. Product stacked on top of a different product stacked on top of a different product, stacked on top of a different product floor to ceiling and then they can't understand why we cant work the entire back room in a night when we have to remove 5 different items stacked front to back on top of the item we need to pull one of to fill the shelf. That doesn't add up little by little and take hours out of your process by the end of the day does it? It affects the speed of a replenishment each morning as well for the same reason. Management and D.M.s are all about follow the S.O.P. and then handing down fury when following the S.O.P under the circumstances does not afford you the ability to complete the task on time. It's demoralizing to the warehouse supervisor and to us on the crew to be busting our butt only to have our supervisor tell us that we need to bust our butts harder because the crap trickles down hill as the saying goes. - Management does not seem to put any focus on pressing the S.O.P. like replenishment on weekends which sets back the entire process by two days. Most of the time we are told stop at 11am no matter where we are in the replenishment report. Some times we get as little as 8 and if lucky as much as 15 pages of a 30 page report done each day less than half and it hurts the entire process at the start of the week. We are stressed the importance of the S.O.P. when we are being told we suck and aren't finishing S.O.P. but then Management doesn't utilize tools like the fabled replenishment calculator that tells them how many to schedule based on sales, and that it usually says we need to schedule 3 people most days and 4-5 on weekends to actually follow through with an accurate replenishment. We are lucky to have 2 people a day weekends included. No attention is paid to variables.