Never again. If you want a professional working environment, look elsewhere. - Avis employé Employé (anonyme) Target

Let me preface this by saying that I have worked in several corporate industries and been a manager myself. I signed up for a holiday job there to make some money and see if Target was a place I'd want to work full time for an extended period. Also, my comments are limited only to the store I worked at; obviously other stores could provide a better environment. Prior to starting this job, a friend told me that their significant other had had a terrible experience at Target due to the management there (a different Target location in our town). I decided to accept the job offer from Target anyway, as the starting pay was $13.50 and they agreed to honor my hours of availability. I understand that there are times when a company is under duress (i.e., during the holidays), but the amount of incompetency I observed was beyond comprehension. It is literally a wonder that they manage to stay open. I feel sorry for the people who work there. Let me also say that for posterity I did begin writing down all my experiences there but for reasons of brevity and conciseness I will not be listing every grievance here. Here's a brief overview: -When I applied online, I noticed that there were jobs listed as seasonal and jobs that weren't. I signed up for only non-seasonal jobs, but during the interview, was told that any position I applied for was seasonal. Also, they didn't seem very concerned about where I'd go, they told me what was available and let me choose. Not a lot of thought seemed to go into proper fit or explanation of different opportunities. -They don't value your time: they kept me waiting for nearly an hour before being called back for first interview (and I watched them subsequently do this to several other hires later, always apologizing like it was a rare occurence), then again for hiring process I waited nearly an hour again. -Serious lack of communication from HR and superiors. There were so many examples of this but here's just one: my supervisor approved an adjustment to my availability which affected my schedule, and never updated it in the system, so every day the affected week I had to find a team leader to come to the time clock and override my punch to allow me to clock in. Only upon asking HR about this (if there was a way to change it in the system so I wasn't having to wait 5-10 minutes at the time clock every day as well as inconveniencing a supervisor to paged) was I informed that it couldn't be changed by HR or me and that my supervisor would have had to have done it. Also, I was informed (and this was the first time I was made aware of this) that if this ever occurred, it was my job to make these changes in a daily log at the HR desk otherwise I wouldn't be paid correctly. Good thing I spoke up. This was also an example of what one might refer to as a typical corporate job in that poor organization led to so much wasted time and labor (which was rampant). -Concerns about sexual harassment: members of my team informed me that we had a man on our team that was sexist, who would make inappropriate comments to women on our team and was negative about women in general. He had already had complaints filed against him, one of which resulted in at least one sit-down meeting with one of our team members (who filed the complaint), the man, and our supervisor. The person who told me about it said that nothing had changed after the meeting and that our supervisor didn't like confrontation so had done little to fix the problem. -Reneged on agreed-upon schedule: during hiring I signed a form saying that my availability was 7am-7pm. During my first two interviews I let them know that I had transportation and personal conflicts that effected my availability; both Team Leads seemed to understand this and agreed that day shift only would be fine. Immediately after hire, I let my supervisor know that I would need to change my availability from 7am-7pm to 8am-6pm due to transportation. He said this was totally fine and we changed it on a form. I was scheduled outside of those hours the following week (11am-7pm) but my supervisor told me it was alright to just come in 9am-6pm. When I was subsequently pulled from my duties to another department, I was still listed on the master schedule for 11am-7pm and this kept confusing everyone else in the store who was pulling me this way and that to many different duties (it was pre-Christmas, so a bit crazy). When the store manager got wind that I was allowed to have a different schedule than what I signed up for at hiring, he said I wasn't allowed to have made changes to it (even though a supervisor, "Team Lead" signed off on it) and my supervisor informed me that I would have to work anywhere between 7am-7pm. He said he was sorry, this was the store manager's decision, and he was just the messenger. I let him know this wasn't going to work with my schedule (as we had already discussed) and immediately gave my resignation. -Lack of organization and communication between departments. -Being yelled at and pressured over walkie-talkie by other store leads. -Benefits aren't available until after a year a full-time work. -There are only two bathrooms in the store, the main customer one at the front and one single bathroom in the way-way back, so getting to the bathroom took a long time away from your duties and/or break-times. -Aren't allowed to use the employee entrance if the main store is open, so must take a bunch of extra time to walk around to the locked employee entrance inside. -Being forced to purchase khakis and red tops and given no allowance to do so. I do not own any khakis or red tops, and spent nearly $100 for just a few outfits to wear to work. If they are going to force people to wear their uniforms, they ought to supplement the cost or provide a decent discount at the store. There was the 10% employee discount, but this was only possible to use if you paid in cash. You could not use a credit or debit card and receive your employee discount. If you signed up for their Red card, you could use that. Talk about a scheme. -There were never enough charged walkie-talkies or MyDevices (we used these little cell phone-like things to look up where items were/should go). It was impossible to do your job without one. During my second week I was pulled from my department and sent to push carts full of items back onto the shelves, which always led to customers asking me where to find things (not to mention I wasn't given training in any other department or where to locate things so this led to a lot of wasted time). One day they gave me an old huge archaic device that was incredibly difficult to use, kept crashing, and I was provided no training on how to use it, so had to wing it. This was on top of the pressure to get my job done as quickly as possible. -There was a definite complacency in the non-management staff I encountered; during training I would ask questions about inconsistencies or things that didn't make sense, and quite often they would shrug and say that's just how it is. I knew that corporate jobs tend to have a ceratin amount of b.s. that actually ends up making an employee's life easier (due to lack of accountability and such) but this really took the cake. -Clique-y culture: prior to taking the job, I'd read reviews here on Glassdoor and other sites about Target culture. I had read that there was favoritism and a clique-y culture, and then did see it firsthand. All the important team leads dressed very similarly in a preppy style and had similar chips on their shoulders. They were good at leveraging pressure on employees during team "huddles," talking about daily goals for the store sales, and pep-talking everyone. It was kind of funny to watch, honestly. I'm just glad I didn't come across this job when I was a doe-eyed 20 year old and would've fallen into the cult-like culture, ew. All these things (and more) added up to me deciding that this was no longer a mututally beneficial working relationship. I was looking for some holiday cash and potentially continuous employment. What I ended up with was a lot more knowledge about Target than I ever wanted. I barely even want to shop there again.