There is a great team atmosphere
Teaches you about yourself and who you are and where you want to be.

I love working at Michaels. I started when I was eighteen and I've been here for about one and a half years. My manager is very encouraging and warm to everyone, although not without his faults, but I don't think those should be held against him. He has given me as well as other associates so much opportunity to move up; at the moment I am very close to becoming a department manager, and not many managers would take a second look at a teenager in her first job. My manager is also incredibly understanding and communicative; he tries to work with associates who are going through a tough time to make work less stressful on them.
The problems I have with working here come from corporate. I want to know their reasoning behind their policies such as one coupon per customer. They should know that customers are just going to keep going through the line over and over to use every single one of their coupons, making that policy worthless except to aggravate customers to the point where they don't want to return. You can imagine the toll this takes on our cashiers who are forced to deal with implementing the policy at the stake of their own jobs.
Also, we seriously need new equipment, especially cash registers and RF guns. Our registers and ATM swipe things are pathetically slow and customers constantly complain about them, not to mention how filthy they look. I don't know how things are going at corporate, but it doesn't seem like they do much listening to the problems happening in-store. I haven't seen changes to these difficulties or others since I've been working here.

I am very disappointed in this company. I have been here for two years.
I have seen tons of people come and go.
Training is horrible for new employees....Goals are hard to attain...
Stress is unreal...I have seen employees get abused by managers and the worst is that HR and others permit this. Its a horrible place to work!
They really should be sued!

The corporate big wigs believe that they recognize what is best for all stores, and they do not easily or readily react to ideas of change (for the better) from the lower employees. The whole company is really very awkward: they are always trying to reinvent the wheel, so nothing works. There is really nothing between "worker" and "manager". They want to be unique, but the result is a very amateurish company. There is also all the work/live balance problems of retail, which is relatively unavoidable.