Pros
Wine Rack has the potential to be an excellent retail job: the best part of the job is assisting / talking with customers, learning about wine and being in a social / friendly work environment. Employees *do* enjoy some perks such as a free bottle of wine per week and a 15% discount on wine. Employees tend to be students or recent university grads, making the work environment interesting and usually friendly. The strongest asset of this company is its Store-Level management, who tend to be fair, down to earth, and understanding in terms of accommodating reasonable flexibility for hours/shifts.
Kontras
There is a CANCER at Wine Rack and it is Wine Rack's upper-management / corporate big shots who have absolutely no idea how to run a business or what is going on at store-level. Wine Rack is run by people driven mostly (it seems) by weekly sales figures. They have no concept of long-term growth, branding, or "the bigger picture". They do not trust or respect their front line workers, leading to a situation where upper-management micromanages the hell out of everyone (they would be smart to trust store-level managers and sales clerks to figure out what works and what doesn't work on a store-to-store basis). Re: Micromanaging---they implemented this retarded program called "Going the Extra Mile" which rigidly scripts EVERYTHING you do (without acknowledging that each customer is different and sometimes you react to situations, not regurgitate a script) and is reinforced by a stupid 'Secret Shopper' surveillance program (that makes everyone paranoid and anal. When sales are down (even if it is due to economic, locational, seasonal, weather factors) they will scapegoat their store managers who, in turn, will scapegoat the sales clerks. This is how the cancer spreads. Everyone gets worried about job security, you start hearing that if everyone "sticks to the program" (going the extra mile) everyone will magically be saved, and next thing you know, sales clerks trying to up-sell customers, running around the street/mall luring customers in the store, or otherwise being put in the position of a rag-tag marketing department. I was literally told to go into OTHER STORES and ask customers to come to our store!?! Anyways, all of this really is not so bad, except people get put under duress or are fired and this is JUST A MINIMUM-WAGE, 20-SOMETHING HOUR A WEEK JOB! And you usually work until 1130 PM! This is not worth the stress! Wine Rack wants *YOU* to go the extra mile for *THEM*, but don't even think they will go one inch for you. Oh, and they DO NOT EVEN GIVE REFERENCES! (Liability issues. Seriously?) Why work a job that is just going to be a giant gap in your resume? Believe me, this job does not offer any incentive that comes close to equaling the circus you put up with. And this circus is completely the product of an incompetent and ineffectual upper-management team. So, for all the nonsense and uselessness of this job, it really isn't worth working late nights for $200 a week.