Pros
The bakery manager was clearly working hard and doing her best with a bad situation; the other folks in bakery were fun to work with in that commiserating colleagues kind of way. I took this job to get better at baking. While it did nothing for my mixing and prepping skills or any basic knowledge, it did improve my timekeeping skills. The pay was just above minimum wage for Oregon (9.89/hr I believe, vs. 9.75/hr). I did not stay long enough to find out what the union benefits were or if the job came with any health or retirement benefits (I highly doubt it). On the plus side, after this job, I know which grocery chains I do not wish to support as a customer, given the quality of their goods and how they treat their employees.
Cons
Being a bakery, the hours are brutal. First week there, I was assigned the 3am-12pm shift, with an hour "lunch" break in the middle. This was commercial, not from-scratch baking: everything came in pre-mixed and frozen, and the bakers only opened packages and put items in the oven. (If you were lucky, you got to decorate some.) I was told they get a lot of turnover from employees who thought it would be a scratch-baking job; if they actually cared about reducing turnover, you'd think they'd mention it in the interview. This is not a job about mixing and baking: it is about timing and packaging. Constantly understaffed and overburdened, running on old and faulty equipment, we still had to be working at top speed and quality to achieve even the basic expectations on the floor. The store gives great weight to the few customer reviews that they get, and with few exceptions, upper management does not take into account other issues (e.g. understaffing and faulty equipment) that lead to, for instance, donuts coming out late or not being decorated nicely enough. On that note, upper management is very disconnected from on-the-floor employees, and it seems they have little sympathy for how hard these lower-grade jobs actually are. I took this supposedly part-time job to make ends meet while searching for work in my actual field. I was given full-time hours, had to purchase my own uniform, had great difficulty getting my paycheck, and by noon everyday, I was left too exhausted to do anything else with my time. The pay was far, far too low to justify the toll on my health and time. Everyone I met there, in and out of bakery (with the possible exception of store management and HR), seemed stressed and depressed. The people who work these jobs are the ones who have to; this company seems to take advantage especially of middle-aged workers and single mothers, people who can't afford to quit and look for other work because they are being paid so little in the first place. The break room was dreary, covered in Safeway/Albertson's advertisements, and smelled like mold. The branded radio station was mind-numbing, and by the end of 3 days, I had the painfully chipper Safeway/Albertson's ads memorized. The dress code was demeaning, restrictive, and expensive... they only recently, "generously" allowed men to have long hair and beards. (Keep in mind, Ashland is a college town full of hippies; long hair, piercings, and unusual tatoos are practically staples of the culture.) The best part of my day was taking my lunch outside to watch the sun rise.
