Pros
You gain lots of hands on experience working at the small print shop.
Cons
They pay minimum (12/hr) but exploit you to the end. You will be thrown in the process and expect to pick up drops of knowledge (if other employees are willing to share when they are not busy) on the fly, apply and use them with no right on error. You cannot make a mistake, however the old heads screwing jobs as much as you do but they will blame you as a new hire on incompetence. A lot of backstabbing and crabs in a barrel types of situations going on. The volume of work sometimes gets high (20+ design projects, they allocate 30 mins on designing a business card, and 15 on converting a CMYK colors to Pantone in the artwork from a customer full of gradients). You are supposed to follow up with the printing process as well, you will load and unload stocks to printers, clean and maintain them, work in the bindery, with customers and much more. As a new hire who never worked at a print shop you are set for failure. The communication is terrible, you won't know you made a mistake and they wont try working it out with you, you just get fired without warning. When they are slow they tell you to not come, so you don't get paid. The benefits are laughable (they pay 20% of insurance premiums for you, so basically you pay your own with a 20% discount, they set IRA for you, only 3 sick days allowed per year, 1 day for official holidays and your birthday, and 5 days of paid vacation after 13 months of employment)
