Assistant Store Manager — Sales, People & Store Operations

The Spice & Tea Exchange•Annapolis, MD

3d•$22 - $28•Onsite

About The Position

The Spice & Tea Exchange is a sensory specialty retail experience filled with spices, teas, salts, sugars, blends, gifts, recipes and discovery. Guests come to explore, taste, learn, find the right gift and discover something new. We are strengthening our Annapolis leadership team and looking for an Assistant Store Manager who can become a strong, visible point person for the team and sales floor. This is not a back-office management job. You will spend substantial time with guests and employees: setting priorities, coaching the team, creating selling energy, maintaining standards, supporting merchandising and events, solving problems and making sure the store is ready to perform. Our operation combines hospitality and selling, training, merchandising, scheduling, store readiness, inventory, production and daily execution. We need a leader who can connect the pieces while keeping people and customers at the center. Initially, particularly through peak fall and holiday season, this role will focus heavily on: leading the front of house and directing daily execution; developing, training and coaching employees; driving sales, hospitality and guest engagement; reinforcing accountability and culture; coordinating staffing and competing priorities; supporting merchandising, promotions and major selling events; and ensuring the store is consistently guest-ready. As the role develops during 2027, the Assistant Store Manager will build deeper capability in inventory control, receiving, replenishment, production planning and other store-operating disciplines in partnership with our Inventory Control Manager and Director of Operations. The goal is to develop a well-rounded store operator, not simply a strong shift supervisor.

Requirements

Demonstrated frontline leadership, not simply management potential.
Experience in retail, hospitality, specialty food/beverage, restaurants, experiential businesses or another customer-facing environment, with responsibility for several of the following: leading shifts or teams; coaching and developing employees; driving sales or customer-experience results; merchandising and store readiness; scheduling or labor deployment; managing competing priorities during busy periods; and handling customer and employee issues professionally.
Approximately 2–5+ years of progressively responsible supervisory or management experience.
Comfortable leading shifts, coaching employee performance and driving commercial results.
Ownership and accomplishment in relevant areas.

Nice To Haves

Inventory-control fundamentals
Receiving, replenishment and ordering
Production planning
Inventory discrepancy resolution
Labor and productivity management
Store scorecards and performance analysis
Operating procedures
Broader store-management responsibilities

Responsibilities

Establish priorities throughout the shift.
Deploy employees based on traffic, workload and business needs.
Coordinate coverage and breaks.
Keep the team productive during busy and slower periods.
Resolve routine guest and employee issues.
Reinforce standards in real time.
Follow through to ensure work is actually completed.
Onboard employees, teach customer-facing skills, coach performance in real time, recognize strong work and address weak execution directly and constructively.
Establish expectations, follow up after coaching, identify reliability or capability concerns, escalate performance issues appropriately and help strong employees grow into greater responsibility.
Model and coach proactive guest engagement, discovery questions, product education and storytelling, sampling and thoughtful recommendations, complementary and add-on selling, gifting solutions, and confident, personalized service.
Help the team improve the behaviors behind measures such as sales, average transaction value, items per purchase, customer registration and other guest-engagement metrics.
Help ensure the physical store supports the experience we promise, including merchandising and display execution, product presentation and replenishment, recovery, cleanliness and organization, signage and pricing readiness, seasonal and promotional transitions, and opening, ongoing and closing readiness.
Help prepare the team for major events and promotions, ensure merchandising and samples are ready, assign responsibilities, create selling energy, adjust staffing as traffic changes, coach during the event and follow through afterward on recovery and results.
Participate in building or maintaining schedules within labor expectations, balancing employee availability with business needs, identifying coverage gaps early, staffing around events and peak traffic, and managing day-of call-outs and coverage.
Ensure promoted products are available and replenished, the team is prepared to sell them, displays are ready, inventory or production concerns are surfaced early, and front- and back-of-house priorities are connected.