If you don't have a college degree, the only jobs you will qualify for are customer service positions or working within their warehouses. They also have a habit of restructuring various departments every 2-3 years, so don't be surprised if someday you are suddenly pulled into a conference room with HR and your manager there to tell you your position has been eliminated. If you don't qualify for another position within the company, your chances of getting re-hired are slim to none. I was one of their top employees and it happened to me. I left the company in late 2012 after they restructured and eliminated my position along with dozens of others. Then 4-years later I moved to another state and tried to get re-hired into a bottom of the totem pole customer service position which I was over-qualified for, but they still didn't hire me back. A few friends who also worked at Grainger for many years told me the same thing happened to them. It seems that once you are forced to leave, the don't want you back because many positions have been moved to foreign countries (to save on labor cost) and they are constantly thinning head count, to squeeze more responsibilities into other existing departments. It eventually got to a point where our manager would bully our department and make everyone feel their job was threatened because virtually everyone couldn't meet their highly unrealistic expectations and metrics. A woman in my department would actually go by the vending machine occasionally to cry and everyone in the department was afraid to tell anyone in HR what was going on. They felt that if you went to HR and talked about how our manager was treating us, that we would be put into a Grainger black book, which meant we would get terrible raises and performance reviews from the POS we called a manager. He was an intimidating bully and I am certain the VP's and HR didn't know what was going on, but nobody would talk, so I never spoke up about it either because I didn't want to be the only one who said anything. They didn't even give us an exit interview after our jobs were eliminated, so I didn't have an opportunity to talk about it with HR on my way out the door. It used to be a great company, but it's not what it used to be.
