Working at A C MOORE — Reviews by Employees

Great store.

High employee turn over. Employees treated with very little consideration or care. SAD

Working at A.C.Moore was alright. The pay is good. However I got laid off months before my seasonal session was supposed to end, and I wasn't even informed of this. I had to ask after seeing my empty work schedule. I enjoyed working with people interested in art because I have an interest in it. The store was clean and the temperature was always appropriate. My co-workers were a bit loopy though. Many of them slacked off and the manager didn't do anything about it, he was too busy getting mad at me for asking my co-worker how to do something.

I've worked at AC Moore for 3 years now and the only way I can explain to you how the store seems to be ran I need to paint a picture for you. Imagine a group of monkeys (head corp.) inside a room that have no idea on how to run a business. Imagine inside this room of monkeys there is a box labeled "How to make the lives of our employees harder while at the same time Not increase profits or fix anything that's wrong." Regardless if the sales are up or down, the group of monkeys draws a slip from the box daily, and inputs the rule immediately. For example, the monkeys recently drew a slip that said "reset the entire framing section with different background paper but at the same time cut the stores hours and require all this to be done within 24 hours. While this reset is being done, take the candy machine out of the break room just for kicks, and replace it with one that doesn't work, that way the employees have to buy from our store." These kind of things have been happening ever since I've worked there. AC Moore is going down hill. They don't even realize how much they get stolen from and the last 3 years I haven't even reached a gain of 10 cent raise. My last raise was .02 cents to round my pay out to $8.00 even!! VEGAS HERE I COME!

You are never recognized for your good work and they wont even put plastic spoons or cups in the break rooms because they cant afford it. I'm not a girl but I was mad when they closed the girls employee restroom because they couldn't afford a plumber to keep fixing it so now nobody uses it, not even for storage. They cut are water filtration system so now we have to drink either warm highly chlorinated water from the water fountain or purchase a bottled water from them for $1.50.

For the longest time the best thing about working there was your ability to put a 50% off coupon on top of your employee discount. What they did was they raised your employee discount from 25% off to 30% off but you can no longer use a coupon with it. Things like this does not make since because why would an employee buy something with their discount when they could get the same deal and a better deal that the customers get with a coupon. They cant afford the insuring benefits for their full-time employees so they cut everyone's hours so their is no longer any full time employees to take advantage of the benefits. If one customer has a return or a competitors coupon a manager must be called up which guarantees a line pile up at the register. There is absolutely zero reason why a manager needs to take 10 minutes to walk up and type a 5 digit number in. It doesn't help anything. I think calling these people monkeys would be giving them too much credit because monkeys have been know to be problem solvers.

This USED to be a fun place to work. Lately, there have been way too many unnecessary rules enacted that serve no purpose other than to make an associate's job more difficult. It is obvious that they have less and less trust and respect for the employee than ever before. (Meanwhile, external theft is at an all-time high--no surprise when there are no cameras, electric strips, or plainclothes officers)! Manager approval needed for more and more things, new rules not explained to the entire staff at once, i.e., if the rule was approved on your day off, you come in the next day and violate it w/o knowing it, and then they give you hell for it! Employee bag checks in and out, no more walking into the cash office with the LOCKED safe to get your paycheck, yet you handle thousands of dollars a day at your register! HUH?

We had a 3-hr. meeting recently where we all had to take turns sitting around a table reading aloud like first-graders! The new info. could have been discussed in 30 min. or less, the rest was just common sense and a waste of our time. The manager asked us for our questions and concerns before the meeting day, many were offered and nearly none were entertained at the meeting. They obviously don't care or are afraid to tackle the REAL problems plaguing A C Moore!

Management plays favorites with the staff, and the MODs and FESs get powermad and act unprofessionally even though their titles don't come with pay increases. It is not uncommon for a cashier to get laughed at when asking a MOD a question and have the MOD start walking away without giving aid or an answer! How do you think the customers feel when they see that the person in charge isn't willing to help a team member OR them to check out in a timely fashion?

Many employees got $.02 or $.03 hourly increases last year, even though Lepley @ co. continue to enjoy their six figure bonuses annually. It is the humble employee who keeps ACM afloat through upper management's ****-ups, so why don't they get paid accordingly? Why is JoAnn Fabrics so profitable when ACM is so deeply in the red? They are both craft stores, it's just that JAF listens to their employees and has a working business model while ACM has its fingers in its ears going, "LALALA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU"!

Some of the other everyday problems include: Hours being cut while they keep hiring new people, prices not on shelves, prices coming up incorrectly at registers, old sale signs not being removed, having to wear uniforms in a creative environment, faulty phone connections, faulty lights both in the store and the parking lot where employees park at night, registers keep rebooting, credit card machines malfunction a lot, co-workers refusing to come to register when called, co-workers standing around talking or pushing a cart around pretending to look busy, having to ask customers a million required questions, wasting time giving refunds just so customers can use a forgotten coupon or bonus card, (Manager will give a customer a coupon if they forget one--whatever happened to personal responsibility?) not getting sent home in a timely fashion during weather emergencies, being understaffed, having a useless theft-deterrent system, Moonlight Madness--three extra stressful hours tacked onto the end of an already stressful shift, etc.

Due to a lack of signage on the front doors, we are constantly cleaning up food and drink messes, and occasionally, dog crap due to PetSmart being next door. Whenever a child or adult is being obnoxious, it gets ignored while customers leave in disgust. Management is always aware of the problem but is afraid to tackle the issue. We definitely attract our share of the Wal-Mart crowd!

I know it's a tough economy, but I wouldn't recommend working here.

I hate working here. It is most definitely a temporary job until I find something else. I don't understand how people can work here for so many years, it's absolutely horrible. It might just be my store, but all I know is .. this place and all the people working in it, suck!

I just started with this company a few weeks ago, but I do not plan on staying long. It seems that the store manager is a tyrant, and they lied to me and told me I was going to interview for a higher position, and then told me they could not offer me that position because corporate did not want someone in that position yet. then why make the offer in the first place? I wqs already warned about stupid things you can get fired for, not the norm that any intelligent person would already know, but really lame scenarios, wo needs the stress for eight dollars an hour?!

I've worked retail for nearly 20 years and this company treated their managers terribly. They expected managers to work 60 plus hours per week-six day work weeks were mandatory beginning in October and managers were never entitled to public holidays even at a later time....you never got the day, ever.
The money was OK, but when you added up all the hours worked, you were averaging the wage of a higher paid hourly employee. The Holyoke store was falling apart; roof leaks, infested with mice and just plain dirty-the company never wanted to pay to fix things or make the place clean. Staff were good, hard working people who enjoyed the product-the company exploited that common ground by increasing expectation and not paying people accordingly. My advice would be, work somewhere else.

I have worked at Ac Moore for two years now and feel very displeased on the way management treats their employees. They have no respect for one another and scream at their associates over small mistakes. I absolutely don't recommend Ac Moore as a good place to work at. I feel like their are no opportunities to expand your potentials. Especially the Ac Moore at Rockville, Md, Diane the store manager is probably one of the worst mangers in the whole retail stores she smokes in the storage room all the time, tries to put you down in every way she can, screams at you in front of customers and even though there are other managers she believes she should make all the decisions. I really hate this job, fortunately I'm almost done with college and i can find my self a professional job and the old hag Diane can rot at Ac Moore.

PAY: The pay was alright. I started out at $0.25 above minimum wage, which was kind of nice.

RESPECT: I got pregnant during the middle of my first year working here. I got sick sometimes, and my boss would just expect me to act like I didn't have hormonal fluctuations and a baby growing inside of me. She once actually TOLD me (after I threw up and said that I needed to leave) that she wanted to demote me because I was unreliable due to pregnancy. I don't think she has ever heard of ADA, FMLA, or worker's rights.

BENEFITS: There wasn't much for hourly workers. I think we might have an IRA we can pay into, or health benefits for those who work over a certain number of hours, but it wasn't really worth it.

JOB SECURITY: Oh, yeah. There was job security. You can keep your job as long as you can stick with their bullshit.

WORK/LIFE BALANCE: I never really had a problem here, though I know that other people did.

CAREER POTENTIAL/GROWTH: Seriously? I didn't see any growth here. You can get as far as you want at the store level by playing by their game and showing up a little early, but there's really nothing more. Who wants to work retail all of their life?

LOCATION: It was close to where I lived and was prime target for the Canadian buses.

CO-WORKER COMPETENCE: A lot of gossip and chatter, yes, but there wasn't much in terms of intelligent conversation. I think I am more used to the college crowd than this one.

WORK ENVIRONMENT: Aside from the wonderful smells of holiday sachets, it just wasn't all that pleasant.