I left the company 3 years ago and really feel for the employees on here, I worked in the company as a Assistant Store Manager for about a year and was also the victim of these completely unfair write-ups aka "Improvement Plans" and just wanted to start off by telling everyone one on here that you should NEVER take any criticism that BN had about you seriously.
Here's my story;
I was the newest manager on staff, something smelled fishy about BN the second I was hired. The first was I realized that we did a very bad job at hiring people during the holiday season, the other ASM was hiring people to work the holidays less than a 2 weeks before Black Friday, I remember after the holidays were over we didn't hit our sales goal and when we had our weekly manager meetings I vocalized that I think we should really try to focus on hiring people earlier next year since less than a 2 weeks before Black Friday wasn't enough time to properly train people to work cash registers and the sales floor and customers were getting extremely upset.
My GM's shift reply was "Well whose responsibility is it to train them" to which I replied "Kinda hard to teach soldiers to fight a war when they didn't even go to boot-camp". A week after that conversation is when the write-ups started coming...
At first I really thought was that it was poor performance since I always have taken write-ups very seriously, but after really reflecting on it and reaching out to other people who left the company (or were terminated), I started to realize a pattern on how BN handles employees they don't see eye to eye with. Now trying to find anything to write someone up on is something I'm very used to, it's the oldest trick in the book (I've never took that personally).
BUT what BN's upper management likes to do with people they don't really like is completely falsify facts and statements on write-ups and pass them off as truth to corporate. Basically, a GM could say you've murdered someone on the sales floor and corporate would take is as fact without even a shred of evidence to back it up. Don't believe me? Any of you guys remember what happened to the Transgender Manager in California? She had the exact same thing happen, only exception is she was smart and built a very solid case against BN, and they lost.
How about Demos Parneros? BN claimed that he was let go due to harassment, now whether that is true or not I honestly can't say. But let me ask you guys a question; if BN really is making up lies to validate terminating long-term employees, would you really be THAT surprised if BN completely falsified what occurred with Parneros? Again, I am not defending him or claiming he's guilty, but I have a very deep gut feeling that BN is on the cusp of a huge scandal something that the retail industry has never seen before. Get out now while you can.