Pros
Even though I'm a huge introvert and honestly don't think I'm cut out for a job as a customer service representative at a gas station, I enjoyed working here compared with the job I had the year before (my only other job I've had so far). Compared with my first job experience elsewhere, I found that at Speedway, the other employees were more kind and humble, there was better training, the work I had to do was more interesting (though still not very interesting, oh well), the people training me were helpful and patient, the interview process was more professional, more job description was made more apparent (we had to fill out a sheet every day checking off what we were supposed to do that day), and most importantly, my rights were protected. At my previous job, I regularly had to work when I was off the clock (so I was working without pay). This sort of thing would NEVER happen at Speedway, at least the one where I worked. They were very knowledgeable of my rights. Also, I know I had some safety concerns working at a gas station, but in my experience, everything was really good as far as safety. I applied to a different Speedway, but they ended up putting me at a smaller Speedway that didn't get as many customers and was overall safer to work at I think. I believe they did this on purpose, because I was a small college female and frankly I didn't feel comfortable working the night shift alone. I know at some Speedways, people do have to work a night shift alone, and I don't think it's very safe. During the three months I worked at Speedway, I saw two news stories, one from nearby and another in a different state, about people who were assaulted while they were working the night shift, and then robbed. At the Speedway where I worked, the store actually closed each night instead of being open 24/7. So there were two shifts, and we didn't have the dreaded third shift. If you are concerned about working the night shift, ask the people doing your interview if there is a Speedway that isn't open at night that you can work at. Hopefully it will work out for you as well as it did for me. I'm sorry, I know that was super wordy, but to summarize, I felt like I was treated with dignity and respect here, I enjoyed all the people I was working with, and I was overall very happy with my experience at Speedway, given the negative stereotypes of working at a gas station. Though I was only there for a few months (it was a summer job) and I didn't get promotions obviously, both of my managers had just recently become managers, and it seemed like getting promotions at Speedway was not out-of-reach, as far as I could tell.
Cons
I was paid just a bit above minimum wage. It was either 7.50 per hour or 7.75, I don't remember which. MEMORIZING ALL OF THE CIGARETTES IS SUPER SUPER HARD. I was good at memorizing things in school, but that didn't help me very much. It seemed like there were at least 50-60 different brands of various tobacco products and it took me at least a week to memorize where all of them are. Most of the customers were very patient and a lot already knew where their type of cigarette was and helped me, but it was still hard for me to memorize all of these at first. (Though after a few weeks it was second-nature.) Lastly, I was lucky that I wasn't at a Speedway that had a third shift, but if you are working at one that does, I don't think it's safe. If you want to see what I mean, google "Speedway Ypsilanti robbery" or "Speedway robbery Chasity." Those were the ones that happened while I was working. The security footage for the Speedway Ypsi one is actually pretty epic. Also, there is NO employee discount. One last thing that bothered me personally is that I felt like Speedway was quite wasteful. We cooked food a couple times a day, and after a few hours, if no one bought it, you had to throw it out. No donating it, no eating it (unless you bought it), nothing. And we had to throw out almost all of it, it seemed, because it wasn't purchased that often. Also, we had certain quotas to reach that were extremely unreasonable. Like we were supposed to sell a crazy amount of candy, and were were supposed to try to ask the customers to buy it, like "Hey, I see you're buying a soda, wouldn't candy go great with that!?" I have never had this happen to me when I am shopping at a gas station, and frankly if it did, I would be kind of annoyed. But if the Speedway regional reviewer person came in and noticed we didn't do that, we would get in trouble (or our manager would). The reviewer person (I forgot the official title) came in once a month on a random day to make sure we were doing everything right. Which was okay and understandable, but sometimes we would get in trouble for silly things that seemed like rule-enforcing for the sake of rule-enforcing, not actually improving the business. You know, silly rules that existed but had no real purpose. We were also expected to hand out a crazy number of membership cards. Our numbers were supposed to be almost 100%, but not all customers wanted these cards, so it would have been really annoying to them to force them to take the cards. So it was another thing, like the candy, designed to help the business but not actually helping anything.