Working at great clips for hair — Reviews by Employees

I worked at Great Clips for 3 years. After 2 years I found that young girls with no experience and LOTS of re-do's were making a higher hourly wage than I was. They didn't give me any raise at all for 2 1/2 YEARS! I once earned a bonus for my high numbers, but it took me 6 weeks of reminding them before I recieved it! It is impossible to do ALL haircuts in 13- 17 minutes. When you do reach thier numbers goals, they change them up on you. If you are one of the good stylists that CARE about your haircuts, you naturally start to get a lot of requests. Of course corporate doesn't like this because it slows down thier assembly line. Almost every day when I would go to work there was a new rule posted in the breakroom. One day they tell you you are required to clock out for a half hour lunch(because business has been slow) and then when it's busy they get mad at you if you eat lunch and customers are waiting. I worked many 6 to 7 hour Saturdays with NO break for lunch at all! I would never work for Great Clips again. It not only is bad for my stress level, but for my reputation as a stylist. I opened my own salon and got the heck out of there. Now I make more money working 3 days a week than I made there in 2 weeks! I have gotten a lot of former GC clients in my salon that are now my regular customers and the main thing I hear from them is that they got tired of being rushed out the door in 10 minutes with a crappy haircut! If you are thinking of working for GC....DON"T!!!

6 years with g-clips and so happy to be leaving.No respect for the hairstyling career we all chose to do. Get them in and out, more like factory assembly line work, horrible place, 26 years as a stylist, we are going to open our own place and hopefully burn g-clips!

Everything everyone has said has been dead on, if the economy wasn't so bad right now they would lose all of their good stylists. We (the good ones) are only there because our husbands were laid off or we have to be. Its true there is a consistent walk in clientèle. You wont be tipped well though, prices like that you are getting a 1 or 2 dollar tip. I hate them with a passion. I have 9 more months till i get to move home to Maryland and i look forward to quiting and never returning.

I thought I had found a great company to work for until I got my review. Prior to my review, I was on time for work EVERY shift, and I had never called in. However, on my review, I was not given my full raise because my haircuts were too fast. Nothing about my reliability was reflected on my raise. So whaddya know, I started to not really care about showing up for work on time. Why should I put forth the effort if I'm not going to be rewarded for it??!! A girl who was never on time, and called in most saturdays got a larger raise than I did. Ridiculous.

I have only worked here for about a year.. I have been doing hair for 10 years. And for someone who is right out of school its a great job. For someone who has been doing hair a few years it is ok.. Not sure if I will say or not...

I have been working for this company for 2 years and I can't wait to leave. It is really frustrating to love being a hairstylist and working for great clips. Everything I love about being a stylist is condemned at this greedy franchise. They do not want you to take your time and do a good haircut, they just want you to speed through it so you can hurry up and take the next customer. They do not want you connect and listen to the customer (even though that's what they tell you to do in training), they want you to just stand there like a machine and do a fast-food, cookie-cutter haircut.

God forbid a woman come into great clips with long, thick hair and wants a cut with layers...she will get a terrible haircut, cuz there's no way you can do that haircut and do it well in under 17 minutes! And the stylist will be pissed off because they are missing out on tips while all the other stylists do 3 or 4 buzz cuts and get tons of tips while you are still cutting those thick long layers for a measly $2 tip! I'm sorry but that makes the stylist start resenting the customer, and that is not good for business. Do you know WHY they have all those coupons and $6.99 haircut sales? Cuz nobody would go there otherwise! And nobody will go there afterward either, because the customer will have to wait up to an hour to get a cut and then they will get their hair cut so fast it makes their head spin, why would they want to come back after that?! It's the stupidest marketing scheme ever.

You know why so many people hate great clips? Because the stylists hate it and it shows. Customers constantly complain that they never get the same stylists twice...it's because the stylists get smart after a couple months and get the hell out! If the stylist is not happy, the customer is not happy. Great Clips really needs to get their priorities straight and start respecting their employees. We are NOT machines, we are human beings, and furthermore we are PROFESSIONALS, let us behave as professionals with an artistic skill, or just keep on rollin em in and rollin em out...I don't care cuz I'm rollin out soon.

company does not care about the customer or the stylist, only the numbers. Not only do you not get raises, you have hourly taken away from you if your product % is not 6% or hair cut time is more than 14 minutes per head.

It is very hard to work for a Great Clips salon. It is very true that you are expected to be at 13-17 minutes per haircut. To take time to do a haircut that a stylist can truly be proud of isn't possible in that time frame. I absolutely love cutting hair but I also want my clients to look good, they are walking talking billboards for my work. Great Clips forces you to be at at least 12% product sales. It is very hard to influence someone to buy good product when they are only coming into your salon because the haircut is cheap. If someone doesn't care enough to come in for a cheap cut then most likely they aren't going to care enough to put good product on their hair. The corporation has so many rules and regulations designed by people who have never touched a single hair off of someone elses head in their entire lives. These numbers that the corporation expects their employess to acheive and only for their own benifet. It makes them lots of money to have their employess treat their clients like an assembly line. To get clients in and out as fast as possible and make sure you don't act like you car about your clients. If you act like you care about your clients and they actually come back and request you then you are completly screwing the company over. If clients want to follow a stylist after she leaves Crap Clips then that takes away the corporations money. Then their mandatory meeting and classes that make you drive hours to get to and then end up learning absolutely nothing are ridiculous. If you are a hairstylist and are in need of a job don't bother walking into a Great Clips. To them their employees are nothing but robots. Robots they intend to work as much as they can (but certainly not so much that the employees are able to get any benefits) and treat like a huge pile of crap. Great Clips sucks. Maybe when they actually act like they care about their employees enough to make them happy then it will be ok. Happy employees happy clients.

If you want to be a robot, then work at great clips. They take excellent stylists and break them down into stressed, over-worked machines. Unfortunately this company puts stylists under a lot of pressure wich effects the quality of the cut. Great Clips has a terrible reputation, being an ex employee, I can tell you that other salons are wary to hire you. And the great haircut sale is a terrible thing, clients tend to tip less when they pay less for a haircut. In my experience, after the sale ends, clients will do whatever they can to continue to get a discounted price.

Everything that has been posted is true. And I do not understand how the company calculates all of their crazy percenteges. For example, I had the most haircuts out of anyone for a particular month, I also worked less hours in this time period than other employees. Yet my productivity number was low. The funny thing is when you start asking your superiors questions, they don't seem to have any answers.

There are better salons out there, the stress and low pay at great clips is not worth it. Save your sanity and work elsewhere. Us stylists have a professional education, don't let a company like Great Clips bully you and break down your self esteem. They tend to use "fear" tacticts and "punish" stylists into submission.

Apon leaving great clips I found a company where I am payed a lot more per hour, treated like a human being, and respected for my hard work. If you are desperate for a job in this economy, please don't settle for great clips, you'd be better off working at burger king untill a good salon job opens up.

Fort Wayne Great Clips is the worst salon to work for in Allen county. I have never seen a business cut so many corners, it is just totally unprofessional. I cant think of one single pro, only cons: too many to name. Fort wayne great clips is a horrible place to work, no respect, low pay, too many rules and no rewards for your hard work. They don't care about the clients or employees.... only numbers