Pros
Pride in making a great product. It's cool to work for a company that has such a solid product and interest. I always had great stories that people were interested in hearing vice most peoples'. They pay pretty well and benefits were top notch. Lots of little perks like theme park passes, free beer, anything related to what they own company wise they'd cut you a perk on. Only company I know of that gives free beer for giving blood. This is a company that usually does the right thing, that sometimes means a bad short term business decision for long term success. Anheuser-Busch is ruled by a tyrant (AB III) or at least the lasting impression from him. That means relentless quality and housekeeping in the breweries and expensive solutions to problems that probably don't mean crap to the consumer but they do to August Busch. It's nice to work for something that has unwavering principles.
Cons
Work life balance pretty much stinks. The attitude was "we pay you well and give you good benefits so stop whining and get to work". It's one of those companies if you work 6am to 6pm and leave at 545pm you'll get the half joking "wow cutting out early today?" jabs. Overall after reading google and amazon it may not be all that bad. My beef and reason for leaving could have been isolated (depends on what others say obviously) but I was promoted so fast my pay would only go up 6-8% on each promotion, soon I found myself a golden boy but making 20-30 grand less than my peers who had less results. How do you fix that without changing companies? "Hey HR guy I want an extra 30 grand raise this year". That's a flaw in most companies, but AB was slow to notice it because their turnover was so low that they had 20 others like me with more experience so there wasn't much burning need to notice me. I was told I was ready for the next level but the jobs I wanted kept getting hand-filled by lesser qualified candidates, often diversity candidates. I'm ok with that occasionally but it happened for three straight jobs in the course of a year. I don't believe my opinion is an isolated one with regards to senior management hand picking less qualified diversity candidates over more qualified candidates. Again, I understand that happens but it just got to be beyond shameless after a while. I think having so much money and not using it may be the downfall of AB. Corporate offices are bloated and would make a Saudi oil company blush. As a project manager I spent a half million bucks ripping up a concrete floor in the plant just because we knew it would look good for AB III's tours. Other companies would not spend money like that. I put in a big $$$ machine that inspects every bottle to make sure the label doesn't fall across the seam line on the bottle. Every single customer I've talked to could care less. I'm not sure if I'm slamming AB or saying they're relentless on quality. You be the judge.
