Pros
GNC was a fun job to work at if you had absolutely no responsibilities in life, such as car payments, rent, family/children. It’s a simple job, both for employees and managers. Just stock shelves and fill our certain forms.
Kontras
There’s one too many downsides to working here. There’s no such thing as balance here. I was a store manager for 2 years. In august of 2020, GNC declared bankruptcy, “Restructuring” as they would call it, but we all knew they were cents away from going under. They shut down multiple stores, which meant employees were let go and managers were placed on leave. Along with that came a whole new form of “commission”. This new structure meant they got rid of commission on products sold and instead gave us a monthly target, and depending on if we were able to achieve these unrealistic goals for our specific stores, we’d get a little “bonus” at the end of the month. These goals were very unrealistic and most stores weren’t able to achieve them, which meant we only got our hourly pay month after month. As a manager I was getting paid $14 an hour, never got a raise until my last month there when they offered me a .20 cent raise, which was a slap to my face considering I was the top selling manager not only in my region, but one of the top selling managers on the whole west coast. After you surpass your goal they only raise it to new unrealistic heights the next month. So our store not achieving our goals and getting the bonus at the end of the month meant my employees were stuck with their very poor $8 an hour pay, which is not sustainable if you have any sort of payment to make. My employees seeing they weren’t making money all quit on me, so I was stuck with working every shift, every day. I’d get there around 8am to clean, fill out paperwork, deposit money at the bank and would work by myself up until 9pm. Then I’d close the store, fill out more paperwork, sweep and mop the store, toss out trash and various other things. I wouldn’t leave until 10:30 on most nights. And keep in mind, I wasn’t allowed to close the store at any point throughout the day to take a break or eat food. The one time I did, I had customers come for my throat for being closed for 20 minutes which then lead to my regional manager called me and yelling at me for closing. After 6 months of doing this I asked my regional manager if I could shorten store hours because I was completely burnt out. I still didn’t have any employees and had no one applying/ interested in working there for $8. Unfortunately my regional manager said no because customers were a priority. Being the hard worker I was, I sucked it up and kept working. After about a year of this, I put my 2 weeks in. My regional manager tried to persuade me to stay, he couldn’t have his top performing manager leave. Also keep in mind, within the span of 3 months we had 2 regional managers quit. I think the last straw for me was seeing GNC was hiring interns to work from home, to do nothing but job shadow call center jobs, and they were getting paid close to $20 an hour, which was insulting considering I had been there for 2 years and had never gotten a raise besides .20 cents, and I was working 24/7. GNC does not care at all about in store employees and about people doing the hard work. Don’t work here.