Spirit Halloween Store Spirit treats employees with disrespect and outright lies to customers Sacramento, California

I was hired by Spirit Halloween (henceforth: "Spirit") for the Halloween holiday season starting back in August. From the very beginning, it was obvious the company (or at least this individual location) had many problems.

For the first few weeks we were busy setting up the store and during this short time we went through two separate assistant managers. Over half of our original starting crew was fired within a few days, leading many of us to wonder why the initial hiring had been so broad if only to fire so many individuals so quickly. Scheduling for the job was handled incredibly poorly and I can with confidence say that the manager of this store, Deshara Wallace, is mostly to blame for this. Wallace would say the schedules would go out on a certain time, as is corporate's policy, but the emails never showed up. She would explain the next day she was still working on it, constantly coming up with an excuse for how she couldn't find a few minutes to do what is supposed to do her job. Then, as if to insult us, Wallace would call myself and others into the store on a minutes notice expecting us to cover a shift someone else didn't show up for. In addition, methods of contact with the store were incredibly inconsistent including: e-mails that would arrive days late, text messages sent at odd hours of the night asking one to come in just several hours later, and phone calls from Wallace's and employees' personal phones rather than the store's business line.

The list goes on and on...

This particular location failed to comply with corporate on multiple occasions and missed many important target dates required for compliance including but not limited to: security camera system still not up after several months, falling to honor returns and exchanges even though corporates policy *IS* to honor these returns up until the 2-3 week of October, faulty credit card and debit readers that still don't work even all this time later, and not posting proper signs regarding loss prevention policies yet expecting employees to awkwardly enforce these rules without anything to point at to show the customer the reason for hassling them.

In addition, it came to my attention after some time that Wallace was incapable of firing employees and instead would outright LIE to them and tell them "she didn't know when their next scheduled day would be" to avoid confrontation. Why she would think this is a good idea I can't even fathom as it surely isn't how anyone I know would want to be treated. I witnessed on multiple occasions several employees coming out of there way (spending gas money) to drive to the store to ask questions regarding their schedules or to call on the phone (using up those minutes) only to be given the run around and told any one of the following excuses from Wallace's list of lies:
"I don't have the schedules finished right now"
"I don't know your hours yet because I'm still waiting on your check"
"Things aren't very busy at the store right now, I'll call you back when it is"
"We aren't scheduling hours right now until it gets closer to Halloween"
...you get the idea. Rather than just coming out and being honest, Wallace would waste people's time, money, energy, put needless miles on their car, and leave them hanging in false hope thinking they still had a job when in fact they did NOT.

When it came to my attention that these things were going on (employees were being fired, but not being truthfully told what was going on) I resigned out of personal conviction to inform these individuals, some of whom were my new friends, the truth of what was really going on. I felt that if I were to say anything while working there about the reality of the matter I would likely get fired and therefore decided quitting was a better idea. Now I'm free to share the truth and am glad I was able to be honest with those who needed to know. One girl, for example, told me she drove to the store on three separate occasions, a round trip of over twenty five miles, only to be lied to all three times that "she would be scheduled back on her normal days next week". Sounds like someone owes somebody a check for gasoline and vehicle maintenance!

In short, I'd recommend anyone considering working for this store to look elsewhere. Trust me, you can do better.

If you are a customer looking for costumes or Halloween supplies, I urge you to support your local businesses before corporations such as this peddling cheaply made Chinese products at "specialty item" prices. If you insist on a superstore, I hear Halloween City is supposed to be alright. In the Sacramento, CA area, check out Evangeline's Costume Mansion on K Street.