I worked at Lowe's circa 2013 and this was my experience as well. One thing to note is that if you're ambitious and not incompetent, you can get pretty far career wise in retail. That was the impression I got anyways.
If you survived the politics of being moved from store to store, never knowing your schedule, and blatant, miserable sexual harassment ("hey let's go out for drinks and discuss how I might let you sell large appliances instead of small electronics"...oh wait..."you didn't go to my apartment...we have this opening an hour away that you have to take with no advancement opportunity".
Okay, assuming the sexual harassment is gone/obsoleted by solid company policy, there's the "chasm" from peon to management that you can only aspire to if you never make a mistake or make them quietly. Or never leave the job to get a degree. Or get lucky somehow.
Those positions at management level above peon required a lot of sweat equity and risk on the part of the worker bee. If it doesn't pan out, well, that's what...3-15 years of your real actual life flushed down the toilet.
I'm with GenX. Screw that noise.
She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a new store, and because she's running the higher profit stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them. She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia.
To... probably make 60k.
I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional manager route or something. OR training would keep her at corporate instead.
Are the people working under her unambitious and incompetent?
I don't think she'll ever wind up at corporate.