Why is the zumiez website so slow

You get to learn a lot of things from providing customer service to organizing and styling the walls of the store. My co-workers and the general vibe of the store were pretty chill. This job is a good place to start if you want to be social in a job setting. Your employee experience will depend on your district manager Store Manager Former Employee - Connecticut - September 29, My first district manager was great and made me really enjoy my job.

I was given clear sense of direction and felt appreciated for the work I put in. Even when work was stressful as retail jobs notoriously are it was still oddly enjoyable because of the culture and empowering environment. As a manager you are expected to recruit, interview, hire, train, process freight, merchandise the store, execute floor plans and self-scan inventories, complete markdowns, transfers, and receivings, prevent theft, never miss a customer, write schedules, etc… for the absolute minimum pay.

Great environment, great customers, and even better employees made up for the work overload. Once I moved to a different location under a different district manager, my employee experience became horrible. I was given zero direction and felt extremely unappreciated. The culture from my 2nd DM was way different than my first. There was nothing to balance out the bad. It was just bad. The worst part of the job is definitely loss prevention.

You are expected to maintain a great inventory score with no help from the company. No cameras, no sensor detectors. This mindset around loss prevention made me paranoid of my customers and made it difficult to enjoy my job. Wage compensation is so low because - more Pros Great progression opportunities and discounts.

Cons Hit or miss with management. Loss Prevention. Extremely underplayed. Augustine, FL - September 27, I was immediately met with compassion and inclusion. Pros Flexible schedule, good discount, great coworkers, amazing environment, fun place to work, good first job. Cons Can be stressful when busy, on your feet most of the time, corporate and lp are slow to respond. Jobs at Zumiez. Sales Associate. Seasonal sales associate.

Fun at first, quickly becomes a dead end job. I was there for 2 years as an assistant manager. Before working at zumiez I already had 2 years prior management experience and took a 2. There were other issues at hand as far as management went at the time, but after not being compensated for what I considered going above and beyond in my job, I simply could not do it for the love anymore.

Pros Flexible schedule, fun work environment. Cons Terrible pay, management. A good job while in school but past that it won't hardly cover Netflix. Typically you just fold clothes and talk to people but due to it being heavily commission based its very competitive and your boss gets on your case if you aren't selling by the "Zumiez steps".

Pros cool people. Cons low pay. I personally did not enjoy working in retail, but my manager provided a framework that allowed me to perfect my sales skills. Write a Review Ask a Question.

Ratings On Other Platforms. Better Business Bureau. Corporate Values. Overview Zumiez has a consumer rating of 2. What reviewers want you to know Positive highlights Everything arrived on time, everything was exceptionally good quality and had no issues with customer service. After I made my online order , I foolishly read all the horrible reviews that Zumiez.

Critical highlights No critical highlights yet. Top Positive Review. Top Critical Review. Rating 5 stars Other Verified purchase. Verified site experience. Contains image or video. English only. Reviews that mention popular keywords customer service 13 order Mattia B. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 0. Chris S.

Verified purchase. Toronto Ontario Canada Tip for consumers: Search the bogo 50 percent off sales first. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 5. Aaron s. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 3. Sabrina M. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 2.

Dagmar H. Hale y. David D. Justin P. Comments 1 Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 2. Gabe M. Products used: Hoodies and beanies.

Brian R. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 1. Mandi N. Tip for consumers: pretty easy Products used: skate board, hoodie, shirts, masks, stickers. Peter L. Jakob C. Comment Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 7. Carlos B. Sylvain L. Ethan L. Claire F. Alec R. Hailey G. Comments 1 Thank you Respond as company Share Helpful 0. Kim G. Bridget C. Alex M. Leslie B. They will take your money and you will not receive your order!

From a regional perspective, our North America business has experienced a 6. There are several factors that have impacted the North America business, including the delay of U.

The quarter-to-date comparable sales decrease was driven by a decrease in transactions, partially offset by an increase in dollars per transaction. Dollars per transaction increased due to an increase in average unit retail, as well as an increase in units per transaction. Quarter to date, the hardgoods category was our largest positive comping category, followed by accessories. Footwear was our largest negative comping category, followed by women's and men's.

Due to limited visibility in the business, we will not be providing guidance for the first quarter of or the fiscal year. That said, we do want to give you a few directional thoughts on how we are currently expecting the full year to play out.

Starting with revenue. For the full-year fiscal , we anticipate that we will recapture lost sales from and drive total sales ahead of the levels that we experienced in , absent a deterioration in the macroeconomic environment.

On a quarterly basis, year-over-year comparisons between fiscal and fiscal will be challenged due to the seasonality shift caused by the pandemic. Throughout the year, we'll be comparing our results not only to , but also to , anticipating a return to more normalized seasonality, making the comparability more appropriate in some circumstances. Examining the high-level impacts by quarter from to and , we note the following.

In the first quarter of , we've gotten off to a slow start. But there are significant contributing factors and offsets that lead us to believe there will be a positive correction within the quarter. Specifically, the delay of tax returns, significant closures due to snowstorms across the south, COVID-related store closures persisting early in the quarter, and the domestic stimulus package signed today.

In addition, we experienced a surge in demand, recapturing some of the lost sales from the first quarter of , and producing a record second-quarter for the company in both total sales and earnings. We believe as seasonality normalizes in that sales in the second quarter will be down from fiscal in total despite a more normalized operating environment. But will grow modestly from the second quarter of fiscal As we look to the back half of the year, we grew sales year over year in both the third quarter and fourth quarter of fiscal compared with fiscal , despite the continued challenges of pandemic in both the back-to-school and holiday seasons.

Our current projection would show total sales growth in the third and fourth quarter of fiscal compared with fiscal Moving to gross margin. Fiscal gross margin was down modestly, finishing 10 basis points below the levels. The primary cause was increase in shipping and fulfillment costs related to the increase in web revenue penetration driven by store closures and the deleverage of store occupancy costs. These costs were mostly offset by improvements in inventory shrinkage and product margin.

As we look to , we are currently planning year-over-year growth in gross margin, driven by a reduction in shipping costs as web revenue normalizes with stores being open and leverage of our occupancy costs on increased sales.

Product margin improved by 70 basis points in versus and grew for the fifth year in a row. We are planning product margin in to be flat to down slightly year over year. The drivers of this include store wages and benefits reductions in due to store closures and reduced mall hours that are not anticipated to repeat in Governmental subsidies received in not anticipated to repeat in fiscal , an increase in costs related to training and recognition events that were significantly reduced in due to the pandemic, an increase in marketing events and spending that were not possible with restrictions in and an increase in travel costs in the back half of with very little travel included in our fiscal results.

On a net basis, however, we anticipate operating margins will be down slightly in fiscal as a percent of sales compared to fiscal while we expect operating margin dollars will grow year over year. We are currently planning our business assuming an annual effective tax rate of approximately We are planning earnings per share to increase in fiscal compared to fiscal with a significant variability quarter to quarter in comparison to and more normalized in comparison to We are planning to open 22 new stores in fiscal , including approximately five stores in North America, 12 stores in Europe, and five stores in Australia.

We are planning to close approximately five to six stores during the year. The majority of the capital spending will be dedicated to new store openings and planned remodels. We are currently projecting our share count for the full year to be approximately Any share repurchases during the year will reduce our share count from this estimate. And with that, operator, we'd like to open the call up for your questions.

Thank you. You may proceed with your question. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the quarter-to-date trend. Maybe you could help us just parse out what you've seen over the last week or so as we start to see some of those tax refunds flow through? And then also curious what you're seeing in Australia.

We're hearing really positive things about the trends there. I'm curious if you're seeing that in your business as well and maybe how you think about that as a proxy for what the U. Thanks, Janine. So as we talk about the first quarter, I guess we gave results kind of here through the first five weeks. And I think generally, they were below where we thought they would be coming into the year, but I think there are some good reasons for that. So just to reiterate what we said on the call, overall, our -- we were down 3.

So on a weekly cadence, as we move through, this did get tougher as we move through February and then turned much better last week and now even into this week. So as we think about that, and we try to dissect what we've seen here through the first five weeks, again, closures had challenged us.

But I think there are some other factors that were pretty significant as well, including a delay in U. Domestically, we called out some store closures related to some of the winter storms, specifically in the south. And we have had ongoing closures in Canada and Europe. So our expectations, as we move here through the rest of the quarter, is that the tax refunds will get caught up, and we may already be seeing that in our results.

Canada is substantially open. We are optimistic, hopefully, as we move through the quarter, we'll see more of Europe open up. And the stimulus bill signed today, we expect to have a positive boots for our business. If we look back at , we definitely saw a meaningful boost in the summer with the first stimulus and then in January of this year as well. So I think that's kind of how we're thinking about Q1. Obviously, not quite where we'd like it to be to date, but I think there's good opportunity ahead of us.

As it relates to Australia, I mean, they've done a great job of managing through this pandemic, really shutting down their borders and being very stringent about how they have operated.

They, like all of us closed in March last year and were closed substantially through the end of April, but they also closed from the end of July until almost October. So they really did have a much higher level of lockdowns and seem to have actually been driven a pretty great result.

So we're really happy with how Australia has performed. I'll tell you was a great year for them down there, both on the top line and bottom line. I think our teams have really performed quite well while growing the business. This is an area where we still have a lot of growth ahead of us, and we're excited about how the business is coming to form down there.

I think that's it. Our next question comes from Sharon Zackfia with William Blair. Hi, good afternoon. I guess a few questions. I don't think you guys mentioned Zumiez Delivery during the prepared comments. I'm just curious kind of how that ended up unfolding and any learnings as we go throughout or maybe even potentially for your international markets?

And then also, just curious whether you're seeing any issues with delayed inventory. Great, Sharon. I'm going to start off with just giving a bit of context for how we think about Zumiez Delivery and I know you're well aware of this.

But again, I just want to make sure for everyone we get this context out there in terms of what we're really trying to do around ideas like Zumiez Delivery.

And this is really about, for me, the sense of how we're trying to innovate for our customers. So I'm going to make a few comments. I'm going to ask Chris to follow up specifically on your question around Zumiez Delivery. So I like just to make sure everyone thinks about what we're doing with Zumiez Delivery or localize fulfillment is all about innovating and leading the way in special retail about redefining how we serve customers.

And not only how we serve customers, but how we can optimize our cost structure around serving those customers. So we've talked about the most obvious examples of being localized fulfillment, which we've been doing for a long time now.

And of course, our ability to rapidly expand our pilot of Zumiez Delivery, which we've been playing with for about 18 months. And then in early -- late October, November, have expanded to 26 trade areas across the United States, which are about half the trade areas that we believe we'll operate in, in the United States.

And really, taking again that unique experience right to the door of our customers. And it also, of course, was really important because we knew we were going to be under a lot of pressure relative to our third-party shipping capacity of restraints that were in place throughout the holiday season.

So I just want everyone to think about these as examples of how we've led on innovating to serve our customer and why simultaneously we're working to optimize the business model around this one channel business concept.

So -- and then next, I just want to understand that our road map for the future innovation is really, really strong. We have built out a lot of initiatives to continue to serve our customers better over the next three to five years that are already in process and in testing in many areas.

And we're building a number of these new innovations. I'm not going to share with you the specific initiatives or plans. I do want to just remind you of the consumer themes that drive our thinking. The first is the importance of speed, and you heard that a number of times in our script.

Our consumer, in fact, I think, not just our consumer, all consumers' expectations, they're getting what they want, when they want, how they want, as fast they want has never been higher. And we believe those expectations for speed are going to increase even more over the next five years. Another assumption we believe to be true is that the speed of trend cycles and brand cycles, already the fastest ever, are also going to continue to increase.

The second key theme for us around why we need to innovate is around our Gen Z consumer. We know, in particular, that this consumer prefers to shop in stores. All of our internal research we do with our customer, the external research we read indicates that the Gen Z consumer overwhelmingly prefers to shop in stores. And we are going to strive through our initiative to increase our ability to create even more human-to-human connections, whether they be digital or physical, right?

We don't really care from that point of view. We just want to connect our customer with our people and make our local stores the center of that experience. And the last of the three themes for me that are kind of governing how we're thinking about innovating for our customer is the concept of local and global. Our Gen Z consumer is simultaneously a local and a global consumer. They want to be active in their local communities while being part of the same global communities.

This concept applies in how they -- our customer pursues their personal areas of passion and in their expectations that will be the source of bringing cool new brands from anywhere in the world to their local store. So again, Sharon and everyone, these are just the themes. I think, as you think about what we're trying to do for innovation, these are things that are guiding us.

And we're going to execute the current initiatives we have in place. Of course, aligned with our brand and culture to meet the consumer expectations, to serve our customers even better, to gain market share, and of course, to optimize our business results.

So Zumiez Delivery, just in context, is just one of those examples of how I believe special retail needs to be reinvented to meet these rising consumer expectations. Now I'll ask Chris to share some more of the details about the delivery -- our Zumiez Delivery efforts. I'll just kind of jump into some of the data. Rick mentioned, we are operating in 26 trade areas. But this is something we started out two years ago in one trade area, really just to test and understand it.

And obviously, with the shipping landscape that we had this year, we thought it was definitely prudent to roll out. So we did that. We did that right at the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter. This encompasses about stores.

Just to put some perspective around it. During the quarter, we were able to deliver almost 55, packages, which is just awesome to be able to bring that brand experience to our customers' door. From a cost perspective, it was comparable to that of our outside carriers.

We definitely have some optimization down the road. I think one of your questions was just kind of what the key learnings are.

I think this is no different. There are lots of things we're going to learn, and we're going to optimize in the year ahead. I think with 26 trade areas, we've got some seasonality considerations we're going to work through.

Zumiez is an easy job and nothing to stress over. But w You will be asked to bring big energy to keep the fun, relaxed, and funny vibe. A lot of laughs and a lot of potential to show what you can do.

Its commission and base pay, as well as incentives ti makes you want to make more money! Best experience of my life. The managers are absolutely amazing. They have always been inclusive, welcoming, and caring. The other sales associates all get along.

Overall, we all work as a team! My manager was cool and it was good job. The managers give a lot of guidance and help a lot. I was 16 when i got hired and didn't really take much seriously.. After like 3 months because of my time management and attendance.

If you want a good first job, work here for sure. The company is great and there's a chance for a lot of benefits. Beautiful place and beautiful people. I loved my time at zumiez, my co workers were great people, and my GM was a great guy who really cared about people. I was just simply not good at retail work, but they did all they could to help me.