- Top Workplaces
- The Container Store
The Container Store
Founded in 1978 and based in Coppell, Texas, The Container Store is the nation’s original and leading retailer of storage and organization products, offering more than 11,000 innovative and multi-functional solutions designed to maximize space and help customers accomplish their organization projects. Since its inception, our company has nurtured an employee-first culture, and coupled our one-of-kind product collection with dedicated customer service delivered by highly trained organization experts.
In addition, The Container Store believes in putting its over 4,000 employees first. This includes a tremendous commitment to communication, providing extensive training, and being invested in each employee’s career development. We feel strongly that if we take better care of our employees than anyone else, they’ll take better care of our customers, each other, and our vendors. And, in turn, everyone wins!
In addition, The Container Store believes in putting its over 4,000 employees first. This includes a tremendous commitment to communication, providing extensive training, and being invested in each employee’s career development. We feel strongly that if we take better care of our employees than anyone else, they’ll take better care of our customers, each other, and our vendors. And, in turn, everyone wins!
Purpose
We provide creative, multifunctional, customizable storage and organization solutions that help our customers save time, save space and improve the quality of their lives.
Vision
We believe our commitment to the category, breadth of product assortment, passionate employees and focus on solutions-based selling create a long-lasting bond with our customers and foster devotion to The Container Store brand.
Mission
We foster an employee-first culture built around our Foundation Principles, which define how we approach our relationships with our employees, vendors, customers and communities and influence every aspect of our business
Additional Culture Details
“Talent is the whole ball game.” When you surround yourself with hugely talented, passionate, dedicated, and genuinely kind people, we believe you will succeed in whatever you do.
The Container Store has built our brand on the joyful conviction that our employees are our top priority, our most treasured asset. One of our Foundation Principles says that 1 Great Person = 3 Good People, in terms of business productivity. So when we’re hiring truly GREAT people, we can afford to pay them above industry average – because we’re getting three times the productivity. We can also afford to do a lot of training – first year, full-time employees receive more than 200 hours of formal training compared to the industry average of 8 hours.
But we also provide something more intangible and harder to quantify. We truly love our employees and we’re committed to caring for their whole being— not just as workers. They’re all extraordinary folks— that’s the only kind we hire—and we fully support their efforts to become the best they can possibly be, both on the job and at home.
As an employer, we believe that we have a moral obligation to create a workplace where people get up out of bed and look forward to coming to work in the morning. We often hear employees say, “Working here has helped me become a much better communicator” or “Having this job has really helped my marriage.” Working alongside great people makes you go home at night feeling great about everything you accomplished that day and thrilled to get out of bed and go back to work the next morning to reach for the stars again.
And these GREAT people stick around – we have an average 10% turnover rate in an industry where many full-time employees don’t even stay a year.
Economist Milton Friedman once said that the only reason a corporation exists is to maximize the return of the shareholder. Well, with all due respect to Milton, we’ve found that if you really and truly take better care of the employee than anybody else (instead of just myopically focusing on the shareholder), your employee will take better care of your customer than anybody else. And if those two are ecstatic, then wonderfully and ironically, the shareholder will be ecstatic, too!
The Container Store has built our brand on the joyful conviction that our employees are our top priority, our most treasured asset. One of our Foundation Principles says that 1 Great Person = 3 Good People, in terms of business productivity. So when we’re hiring truly GREAT people, we can afford to pay them above industry average – because we’re getting three times the productivity. We can also afford to do a lot of training – first year, full-time employees receive more than 200 hours of formal training compared to the industry average of 8 hours.
But we also provide something more intangible and harder to quantify. We truly love our employees and we’re committed to caring for their whole being— not just as workers. They’re all extraordinary folks— that’s the only kind we hire—and we fully support their efforts to become the best they can possibly be, both on the job and at home.
As an employer, we believe that we have a moral obligation to create a workplace where people get up out of bed and look forward to coming to work in the morning. We often hear employees say, “Working here has helped me become a much better communicator” or “Having this job has really helped my marriage.” Working alongside great people makes you go home at night feeling great about everything you accomplished that day and thrilled to get out of bed and go back to work the next morning to reach for the stars again.
And these GREAT people stick around – we have an average 10% turnover rate in an industry where many full-time employees don’t even stay a year.
Economist Milton Friedman once said that the only reason a corporation exists is to maximize the return of the shareholder. Well, with all due respect to Milton, we’ve found that if you really and truly take better care of the employee than anybody else (instead of just myopically focusing on the shareholder), your employee will take better care of your customer than anybody else. And if those two are ecstatic, then wonderfully and ironically, the shareholder will be ecstatic, too!
Values
- 1 Great Person = 3 Good People
- This is our hiring philosophy. Talent is the whole ball game. We’re wild-eyed fanatics when it comes to hiring great people. We’re constantly on the lookout for amazing employees who elevate the game of everyone around them to a new level. Our employees might not even have had any experience in retail. We’ve hired lawyers, PhDs, artists – people with talent and a passion for teaming up with other highly motivated employees to get the job done using their own individual creative genius. We liken it to puppy love – that feeling you got in grade school when you just couldn’t believe the coolest girl in school actually liked you back. It sure made you want to get out of bed and go to school in the morning! There’s just nothing more exciting than that genuine feeling of truly admiring the people you work around. Another important aspect of our 1=3 philosophy: Since we’re getting at least three times the productivity from our employees (it’s a purposeful understatement – you can actually get much, much more than three times the productivity at certain endeavors), we can afford to pay the people closest to the customer – our salespeople – 50 to 100 percent higher than the retail average, to communicate with them breathlessly, and to provide excellent benefits, hundreds of hours of training, and a happy place to go to work every day. It’s a win-win-win. The employee wins because she’s getting paid twice as much and gets to work alongside other great people. The company wins because it’s getting three times the productivity at two times the payroll cost. And our customers win because they’re getting great service from highly-motivated employees.