Disappointing experience - Store Manager Saje Natural Wellness Employee Review

The other bad reviews on here took the words right out of my mouth. This company positions themselves to be all about wellness, but the employee experience has really gone downhill recently. These review show the way their staff feel about how true that culture of wellness is. First, I just want to mention that this is one of the worst benefits packages I have had in all of my full time jobs. You would think a wellness company would want to fork out a little more money so that their employees have things like direct billing and more than 50% coverage on most things. They seem to have dumped a lot of money into opening new stores in the USA, and now their Canadian teams that have been making good money for them and paying for that expansion are the ones feeling the consequences of their bad financial planning. And you should hear the stories from the USA stores. The store managers get to meet once a year and the Americans have some real stories to tell! Lots of them opened without staff and the store managers at some store were working 12 or 14 hours days for weeks! If they couldn't even plan for their new store openings, how can I expect that they are planning smart for the long term? It's a big concern for me. At my store, traffic is way down and we are no longer able to make our stores sales goals and we all feel on edge because of it. So many people are leaving without explanation or being let go left right and center that nobody thinks they are safe. Its a toxic environment. For months and months the sales goals were raised to ridiculous heights to try to make up the money they have lost, and it has been really discouraging to all of us who work so hard just to feel like we are failing. They keep firing important positions like regional directors and directors of operations and directors of HR that over time has made everyone feel really nervous about what the heck they are doing. They keep acting like they're restructuring and making a new plan and it happens so much that even part time employees think they are flying by the seat of their pants. On top of that, for store managers, they have done major budget cuts on labor. Most store managers had to reduce their team members hours because of the labor budget cuts lots of great people quit because of it. This happened right before and over the holiday season! Store managers were left with less people on their teams, less hours to schedule those people and higher goals to try to reach with way less people. There have been days where the labor budget gives store managers less hours to schedule than their store is open! Here, have 9 hours to schedule employees on a day when your store is open 12 hours. Good luck! And when you tell them that's not enough hours, they tell you to borrow hours from another day... so then you take hours from your busy days like Saturday and Sunday, because those are the days where they actually gave you a few more hours. But then you have less people to try to make goal on the one day a week when you actually have a chance to make goal...... And we're a wellness company so don't get stressed about it! And right when all the store managers were getting stressed out over the sales goals, a bunch of us were approached by one of the CEOs, Jeanpierre, to sign up for his other company's "life coaching"... this feels like a scam. He offered a "deal" to pay for a portion of the coaching and offered to "conveniently" just take the monthly payment off of my paycheck. So they asked a bunch of their store managers to take a pay cut to get "coached" by someone who is younger than them in some cases, and who doesnt even have any kind of real credentials in coaching (except that they were taught in his own coaching system). I think only one of the coaches in the program actually has some kind of degree or accreditation for legitimate business or life coaching. Jeanpierre openly talks about his coaching business "saving" Saje in the past. It sounds like he is trying to do it again and he is getting the money from his own staff to save the business. I won't say if I signed up or not because I dont know how many people did or did not and I want this to be anonymous. If you are applying for the "company culture" think twice. If your job isn't in Vancouver, you're probably going to be an after thought. They get the good parties and the Vancouver stores get approved for way more events and they get way more communication from the higher ups. Everyone else is just expected to keep grinding. Another part of the culture that feels like a lie is the "growth" culture. They talk about growth like its some big pillar that they revolve their business around but there are so many store managers who have carrots dangled in front of their noses for months or years with promises of promotions that never come. Many of my friends that I met at Saje have gone on to way better positions with other companies. Saje is turning itself into a stepping stone for people to get hired by better retailers. There are also some store managers who finally got promotions with Saje and then had them taken away when all of those budget cuts happened. Those people left. I don't know if they quit themselves or were let go when the budget cuts happened because it all happened quietly. And they are now terrified to talk about it so us current employees may never know what happened. I go to work stressed out every day. Am I going to be next? You never know if your job is in danger when you're not making your goals. It's all about the money these days. I wanted to share this while I still count as a current employee since its easy to assume that former employee reviews are only negative because they are disgruntled. Dont assume that about this company. The people here have given really honest reviews. I may work in a store but I can even realate to many of the things that the head office reviews here have said.