Pros
The culture at Fred Meyer is really great, they really respect and value their employees. Everyone, from management on down, seemed to enjoy working there and seemed to be in a good mood the majority of the time. I only worked there on a temporary basis (summers during college) but I very much enjoyed it and I would recommend it to anyone. I've heard of much, much worse retail work experiences.
Cons
The only downside was the schedule--as a new hire I often had to work the closing shift, which was 2 pm to 11 pm, and often weekends as well. But I should add that everyone had to deal with the crazy schedules, not just those on the bottom of the food chain. The only person who never had to stay late was the head manager--he generally worked about 9 to 5--but even he would stay late if needed, i.e. if the relief manager had an unexpected emergency or was sick. I suppose another downside is that Fred Meyer employees are union-represented, which means you have to pay about $40 to join the union, plus monthly dues, and (at least as far as I ever saw) you don't really reap any benefit from it. Plus, the union status means that once an employee is hired, it's very VERY difficult for them to ever get fired, even if (frankly) they should be. As an example, my department hired a guy who was very nice but amazingly incompetent (I mean really, it doesn't take a lot of brain power to do this job, yet he had difficulties), yet he stayed on because he would have had to do something really grievous to get fired.
