Pluspunten
The people that work for Sports Basement make it an unbelievably great place to spend your time. Most employees are passionate not only about their specific area (both floor staff and corporate operations) but above all about the company itself. The energy is positive and fun, with a healthy dose of focus and creativity. There is a decided air of autonomy that pervades the company, and if you think that something is important you can often find traction with your idea, which is extremely unique in a growing retail company. Moreover, everyone likes to have fun doing what they love - whether it is making signs, biking, running, putting out socks, or telling people about shoes, the people are what make this place worth working at! Another great thing about working at Sports Basement is that time-off is virtually unlimited. As long as your manager does not think that you are ignoring the job, most of them seem to be very willing to work with you to make your time-off as well as general schedule work with their needs. The company has some pretty great benefits that do their best to offset the frustrations of low salaries. Such as break rooms at all of their locations, free staff trips (paid for by the company), health care (for all full time staff!), and reimbursements for races that you want to do, not to mention stock options that accrue over time as well as a sweet employee discount! Overall, for a job to make ends meet for a little while, these make it pretty much totally worth it. In the long run, though they may not totally outweigh all of the negatives.
Minpunten
As cliche as it is to complain about pay, that is probably the worst part of working here. It could take a very long time to get to a comfortable salary level, and that basically does not exist anywhere in the company. The benefits try to outweigh this, but it is very easy to overlook them for many people. The other biggest problem is that communication is an extremely difficult issue within the company. It is very possible, even in a position of leadership, that you will be told to do three different things on the same "project." Delegation is not the strongest suit of the leadership, and often it can interpret as a loss of the autonomy that so many people love within the company. This is also tied to the fact that things are not always extremely organized from an operational standpoint. Sometimes, it seems like the company's policy is one in which they "look briefly, then leap" rather than a "take a good look at what you're about to do, and then leap."