Pros
Great job for coasting and living check to check, unless you get to management. Lots of great opportunities to learn different aspects of crafting through helping customers who need their projects designed and finished for them on the spot, but make sure to have google at the ready. Honing your memory is a huge feature of working here, since the locations of everything are always changing and you're expected to know the locations of every single item in the store. Great morale boosters; everything from a gold-star calendar to a special card with your name on it that says "You're a Star!" posted to the break room corkboard. Very good place to work if you're a sociopath or very congenial person; success is very closely tied to how well you can make friends with management (and that's true all the way up). Speaking of sociopathic behaviors; if you were interested in a crash-course experience with the breeding grounds of mental disorders, this environment is perfect for both developing mental issues and destroying everything you identify as being part of your life. If you have enough of an intellect to read Catcher in the Rye and know it's a terrible book, you'll probably enjoy the strange novelty of being smarter than the people you work for. Now that's just the general; I did work in the Profesional Expert Custom Certified Specialist Frame Expert Certified Design Professional department. It's so awesome to learn some ABC's of selling from Michael's. Everything is about how to make the customer feel like they're getting what they're paying for, and telling them as little as possible. I just loved being able to look at customers and know the exact best way to deliver the alternative facts in a convincing manner. The other great thing is how they're always hiring new people. I worked there for two years, and when time came for a new manager, they were so thoughtful they pulled an old lady who couldn't move much with no experience whatsoever and made her the manager. Nothing was more fulfilling than taking on the entire weight of production, training my manager, and deigning authority on processes and procedures to someone with no experience. Silly me got distracted, though, and had too much fun with all of that, so my sales suffered a little; luckily management is VERY quick to notice when something is going wrong and are VERY good about providing a meaningful and powerful way to correct your failures; they'll always keep you on your toes, which is a great exercise. All in all, there are just so many opportunities at Michaels for so many different things. Oh, and benefits were okay-ish.
Cons
You'll never know if you're going to get fired tomorrow. Initiative is awarded with feelings of incompetency and more to do. If you like framing, don't work here because you won't like it anymore. If you like people, don't work here because you won't like people anymore. MANAGEMENT WILL SHAME YOU FOR ATTENDING COLLEGE. The social shitstorm doesn't get better higher up; it goes all the way up. CONSTANT LYING; literally constant, to customers, to managers, to employees. Scheduling availability is a joke; management will schedule you anyways and expect you to resolve it yourself. Management only takes accountability for things that go well. The customer base does have some nice folks, but for the most part, the people shopping at Michaels are incompetent and stupid. If you can't assume what management wants you to do in any given situation (in spite of not recieveing any training), then you're incompetent. MANAGEMENT TAKES NO ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THE STORES THAT THEY RUN BECAUSE CORPORATE EXPECTS TO REPLACE YOU. The only positions in the store I've seen as even mildly "secure" are store manager and assistant store manager; everyone else is expected to be replaced and the money they get paid (relatively) speaks volumes.