Toxic, Hostile, Vindictive, Incompetent - Anonymous employee CarMax Employee Review

1.0
21 Oct 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You can work remote a couple days a week, which keeps you away from the office and the misery.

Cons

* Your co-workers will openly mock you with memes or talk crap about you behind your back. *You are surrounded by hostile, burnt out, fake people who are so jaded and demoralized they passive aggressively take out their frustrations on others. * Your managers will be incompetent and vindictive. * Your managers will play favorites, and only favorites will be able to get work done. * When you work to get an initiative off the ground, your manager will inject his or her favorite into the project to deliver and take credit for at the last mile. * Your manager will work to turn everything against you and punish you for trying to improve things, meanwhile they have no strategy for their "Vision" which is usually just marketing buzzwords. * Your manager will gaslight, blame, and attack you for "failing" when there's no clear direction and even your manager cannot tell you what success looks like because they don't have a strategy * Morale is non-existent, everyone hates their job and is trying to get out. * Because of the culture, you cannot really trust anyone, so much like a prison, your best bet to survive is to silently do your time and turn your computer off when you are done for the day. Do your best to forget CarMax exists. * As a rule, IT initiatives fail to deliver on time, fail to consider the larger environment so everything breaks and is hard to deal with, but this is okay because the favorites are the ones doing the projects so it's not them, its just hard. God help you if you're not one of the favorites though

Explore other reviews about CarMax

5.0
31 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Everything is great I love how it is ran

Cons

Everything is great the way it is

4.0
13 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The perks of working at CarMax are quite extensive. Associates are offered an aggressive 401k program, Stock Purchasing Plan, in store discounts on sales and service, access to the CarMax Wholesale system, excellent healthcare, plenty of PTO, and at my location we are given as much OT as we want. My coworkers are generally good people, that I enjoy being able to work along side day in and day out. Management is very understanding in regards to calling out sick family emergencies, and schedule requests.

Cons

Despite doing the work of 5 people, and very politely asking for a raise management will not give me more than my 3% annual raise which is the single biggest let down. The bonus change of 2025 being labeled as "exciting" was straight corporate gaslighting unlike anything I've ever seen. Since the start of 2026, as of this review being written we have lost 7 associates largely due to pay, and I am soon to join those associates. Management from the store level up to corporate needs to understand that to retain their top performers they need to be compensated like a top performer. Some members of management are cliquey and moody which is very frustrating to deal with. Quality of Management varies wildly from store to store as well

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