I started with the company 24 years ago, and I was a proud employee. I loved working for Advance Auto Parts. Our customers loved coming to us, and corporate genuinely seemed to care about our well-being, happiness, and automotive knowledge. Over the last 15 years however the company's focus shifted from a good employee and customer experience, to sucking as much money as possible out of it's customers, (and employees as well) with little concern for their experience. Changes in upper management likely led to this, CEO Tom Greco specifically taking his largest payday ever in 2020, when the rest of the world was suffering financially from COVID and prices everywhere were skyrocketing. He got his and bailed leaving the company floundering. We're repeatedly told the company is "investing in it's employees" as if they are planning to improve our compensation or work life, but it's all lip service however because things only ever get worse. They avoid giving raises or merit increases, sometimes even reducing pay, yet they continually ask more and more of us. They only thing they've done for the employees in recent years is adding a sparks points program where if you go above and beyond every day to earn points at the end of the year you might be able to use them to buy a pencil topper or two. They also added options for associates to borrow money, which of course charge interest that goes straight to the company. There are so many problems with the computer systems and other things like the inability to do a comprehensive nationwide search of a person's purchase history from a phone number, something that is basically industry standard that every other retail chain can do, but to fix these things would require an initial investment, which they don't want to do apparently. Corporate greed has killed Advance for the employees and the customers.
