Within my three years at the company, corporate slashed allowable hours for staff dramatically. When I began, we were always busy between the lab, the eyewear sales staff, and the doctor's office, but it was at a manageable level. As hours that the managers were allotted to schedule were granted declined, the staff was consistently stretched too thin. There simply wasn't enough manpower, despite having employees willing to take more hours. Instead of addressing the problem of limited hours allotted for employee coverage, corporate was always sending elaborate gifts (ie: a box of at least 50 individually wrapped sugar cookies, all with a transferred printed logo in the LC colors) or sales "tips" or new dress code rules printed in large, full-color card-stock weighted catalogs or notebooks. The things that corporate spent money on--as opposed to much needed training hours for new staff, employee hours so we had adequate coverage on the floor--was truly maddening. There was such a disconnect from corporate to the hourly workers. There was immense turnover of individual store managers and district managers, and they were consistency replaced with outside hires who did not have any optical experience what so ever. As a result, you had an untrained staff attempting to do the work formerly done by two or three employees, managed by people who knew nothing more about the optical field than their new hires, and corporate constantly questioning why numbers were not being met. There was no emphasis on optical training, which was simply embarrassing to those who did know what they were doing.