Pros
Pay is hourly. You will be payed for overtime. Good benefits. Good PTO. Company car which you can use for personal use. Occasional bonuses (usually not great.) Decent year end bonus! You can usually take time off anytime you want and make your own schedule. Taking off early or starting late occasionally is no problem as long as your hitting your hours per week goal. Summer is the slow part of the year, which is great because this is likely the time you'll want to take vacations especially if you have children!! Depending on management, you won't be micromanaged as long as you're hitting your sales numbers The job was great when we were told that we were the "CEO of our territories" and allowed to run our business the way we saw fit. You'll be able to work as hard or as little as you want as far as labor goes. Overall the culture has been good in the past. Co-workers have been solid. The best part of the job is being able to say you work for such an iconic American brand/ company.
Cons
The pay ($50,000) is not very good for what you have to do and deal with. The company car offsets this a little though. Minimum hours is 40 but you will get questioned and talked to if you're working under 47.5. They'll tell you "This is the number of hours we've found it takes to do a good job." They will approve you to work up to 55 hours much of the year. Especially around holidays. Taking PTO the month of a holiday like Easter or Halloween is frowned upon Except Christmas. You'll find that management will put more and more on your plate without any added pay or benefits and your personal life will suffer if you allow it. Don't allow it! The occasional bonuses aren't worth working 55 hours a week in my opinion. The year end bonus is a good amount but mostly based on company wide and regional performance and a smaller part is your personal performance. You'll find it easy to work yourself into the ground. Endless amount of work to be done unless its the summer- the "slow season." Your coworkers being those in grocery stores. Sometimes grocery employees/ managers can be rude, demanding, and very difficult to deal with especially with you being an outsider working for a "vendor" or "supplier" company. They can treat you however they want. Not being able to make friends with your Hershey coworkers easily as you don't work with them or see them daily. Only at meetings which happen ~6 times a year. The job can be very unrewarding. Repetitive. Constantly asked to do more. Unappreciated much of the time. Company is heading is a bad direction. Hiring and promoting people that can barely do the Retail Sales Rep/ Territory Sales Lead role into management. A fairly complex job that takes AT LEAST a Year to master. Then they get promoted to be management at 1.5 years. You need at least 3 years of being an RSR/ TSL before you should be leading anyone. In the last few years, the company went from having leaders in management to having incompetent micromanagers playing corporate boss. You're going to be told all the opportunity for promotion and advancement but then get strung along for years. Management likes to gate keep you in this role. You can have a conversation about promotion and your manager will say to do A,B and C. You will prove yourself by doing ABC. Then the next conversation will be. "You need to do D and E." Then you have done ABCD and E. Only to be told you need to work on some frivolous or basic task you learned week one. If they don't want you to promote they will keep giving you hoops to jump through. Even if you do everything and document your progress put forth by your manager, you will only have the opportunity to apply for promotions. Nothing is guaranteed!! You will only get promoted if your manager likes you, holds your hand through the process, and then if the hiring manager likes you. Declining company culture which started with the change in CEO to Michelle Buck and accelerated when the last VP of retail- Tom Smuda left and was taken over by Stephanie Shein- Berman. The Hershey Company is being taken over by people that want to play the part of Corporate Boss but are not real leaders! This is most evident in the Regional Managers/ "Leaders" who will be your direct superior. Don't get me wrong though, many of the RLs have been great.