Pros
Good pay, benefits, variety of activities and never boring. If you're looking to lose some weight, you will. Because you're running through the store trying to get everything done.
Cons
Company places unrealistic goals on their merchandisers because of promises they've made to clients that activities will get done. Clients are short-changed all the time because there are way too many activities to get done in allotted time frame. They usually don't get the level of service they're paying for. Not acceptable! Books are a joke. Book distributor can't get their act together with shipments and traits, yet merchandisers are written up if book dept isn't set exactly like mods (which usually aren't updated on time and you're expected to go back & fix when they are) or a display isn't on the floor because the store mgr won't allow it. That's ridiculous! Not fair! There's not enough hours to get book dept in excellent shape and do the other hundreds of activities on the list. And the stores don't do their part zoning the books when you're not there. You get to clean up after customers who just leave things they don't want in the books and overnight store associates who just put things in books because they're too lazy to put them where they belong. Another fun thing is dealing with Walmart mgmt. Ninety-nine percent of the time they do what they want to do. Doesn't matter if you have a letter from their corp office saying you have authorization to do the activity. You're then expected to keep asking them to let you do it. One thing you don't want to do is upset a store mgr. They don't like vendors to begin with, and especially not a pushy one. Consider yourself lucky if you get a cooperative store mgr. And you're lucky if you have a part-time merchandiser to help you, but most times they're not given enough hours to get things done right. If you have a project that store associates are supposed to help with you're pretty much on your own. They'll tell you they don't have time.