Pros
-You get paid. -Free half pound of coffee every week. -Shift drinks. -Some nice people although there are also many very annoying people.
Cons
Basically everything else. There is a host of things that is wrong with the company and everything they make their employers do. There are so many things wrong with this job that I don't even know where to start. The first thing that comes to mind are the terrible, terrible products that this company makes us sell. There is such a huge emphasis on food at Caribou; food that is all frozen and disgusting. Stick anything in the convection oven and it becomes a grease faucet. That includes chocolate chip cookies and things that you really wouldn't expect to have any grease in them at all, like scones. The breakfast sandwiches are okay until you cut one in half and take a good look at what you are eating. We are asked to up-sell this slop to every single ticket: "Would you like a grown-up grilled cheese or an apple fritter with that?", even ones who repeatedly say no upon multiple visits. I remember once being asked to lie about the meat contents of the roast beef grilled cheese to a vocally vegetarian couple in order to sell it to them. The coffee beans are also terrible. Although some of the lighter roasts are actually pretty good for corporate-roasted coffee, anything dark-roasted is going to be slathered in oil and grease and will be literally pitch black. We are also forced to up-sell beans to almost every single customer. There is a promotion going on right now for an "extremely rare" coffee that we are selling for $19.99 a pound. This same "extremely rare" coffee can be purchased through internet retailers under a different name for $6.00 a pound, and yet we are asked to force these beans on to everyone, including those who have denied it in the past and those who just want to pay two dollars for a small cup of drip coffee. The merchandise that we are pushed is a huge waste of corporate money. I can't imagine that anyone going to a coffee shop would want a 2GB flash drive that costs $16 or a shoe wallet. Corporate can afford to send us these awful items with every order, but can't afford to pay it's employees normally (indicated by the new "differential pay" system, which means there can only be one person clocked in at a time receiving supervisor pay. Multiple supervisors at once will not all be paid their supervisor salaries). Upper management is a massive tangle that I like to think of as a phone switchboard. People are always being shuffled in and out. The assistant manager at my store, who doesn't have a car and can't feasibly switch locations right now, is being asked by the district manager to relocate and manage a store fifty miles from where she lives, or else get fired. The DM knows that she can't move but she refuses to accept it; she's basically forcing the AM out of a job for really no visible reason. There are many, many more things I could bring up about this company but this review has gone on long enough. In a nutshell, don't work here. You will hate your job and your life, and the company is gonna fold in the next few years anyway.