I could complain about low pay, irregular hours, holidays and weekends, et cetera like everyone else does, but truthfully, it's retail -- those things are a given. The thing about Hy-Vee that left the worst taste in my mouth is its disingenuity. 'A helpful smile in every aisle' and 'employee-owned' are clown masks to cover up the cliquey, clubby nature of a company that could care less about you (the underling).
Unless you really get into Hy-Vee as a lifestyle and make it your mission to embody the company ideal and ascend the ranks into upper management, don't count on a whole lot of positive feedback. There's a real fakeness to Hy-Vee. I would get zero in terms of performance reviews, and the meager raises were often skipped or 'forgotten'. Any time I had an issue, my HR manager would tell me "you're such a good employee, we don't want to let go of you" and then never bother to get back to me with a resolution. I knew a lot of other employees who had similar experiences.
Since I worked in the same store over a period of years, I witnessed a general downhill pattern. When I was first hired, management was competent if not particularly demonstrative. Over time management change so frequently I lost track, and every new generation of managers they brought in seemed less and less qualified. By the time I left, upper management didn't seem to care at all about anything except whether or not I had a smile on my face, and the assistant management team was a joke -- they were all fresh out of college and either lazy or poor team leaders who just wanted to flex their muscles for an ego trip. There was a lot of favoritism played and unprofessionalism (managers in their early 20s who would party and drink on the weekends with teenage employees and then buddy around with those employees in the work place, expect less performance of them, etc).
Hy-Vee also takes the whole friendly neighborhood grocery store thing too far. It's obvious when someone is just trying to get in and out of the store and doesn't want to stop and chat about the weather, but you'll get in trouble if you don't try to engage every single customer you walk by. I can personally say that as a customer who sometimes shops at Hy-Vee I've been annoyed after being greeted repeatedly by the same employees who almost shout across the aisles to get my attention when I'm facing away from them.
Maybe I just had a bad experience, because in my early days at Hy-Vee, it didn't seem that bad -- just a generic part-time job, something to get me through college but nothing I'd plan my future around. During my time there I saw a lot of employees who would just stop showing up or walk out of shifts because they'd burned out and had it up to here, and I was one of them.
