McMaster-Carr reviews

Management are all hired straight from college, do not understand the employees work that they manage. Everything is very micromanaged, they make you track what you’re doing every minute of the day and they are on top of you if you are below expectations. The worst is that your basically expected to make zero mistakes and completely work very fast. This leads to high pressure to be locked at your desk all day. There is no vertical movement, your only allowed to move teams when it’s on their terms and it could be to a completely new team you’ve never heard of.

Injuries are common, especially repetitive movement injuries. Body care becomes a second full-time job. You will be so exhausted that your quality of life outside this job will suffer. Training is inconsistent. New trainees are given very little time to meet high performance expectations (new hires used to be given up to six months to meet expectations, but are now given only two months). Despite being well aware of these changes, supervisors and management treat trainees who underperform like lazy, incompetent children. Standards are constantly changing to the extent that people who have worked in the same role for decades will suddenly be on the chopping block. This creates an INTENSE culture of fear, which is motivating in the short-term, but in the long-term has diminishing returns. Anxious people make mistakes. The company also hides its lay-offs in this way. They strategically increase standards to a near-impossible level, then create negative performance reviews to cover themselves legally before firing ~20% or more of a department over ~two months. Your performance will be compared to everyone in your hiring cohort. For example, if one of your peers exceeds expectations one month, you will be asked why you are not doing as well as them. That person may be physically very different from you, may be cross-trained in different departments, may be a decade younger than you, etc. Favoritism is also intense, with HR, management, and supervisors supporting certain individuals, but telling others that support does not exist. This ranges from maternity leave options to alternative roles for injured workers to errors disappearing from certain workers' records. If you are injured in any way at work and you are not a favorite employee, you will be treated like a disgusting, broken thing and will likely be set up to be fired after your return. HR claims that repetition injuries are not possible if prescribed movement strategies are followed, but they also stopped tracking data on the safe movement system after a record year of injuries, including many workers who had previously received perfect reviews of their workflow movements. Because everyone knows that problems go away when you no longer have evidence of them. Management and supervisors are primarily inexperienced recent college graduates who, despite having never worked before, speak down to employees who have equivalent or better education and more management experience (until 2024 all warehouse workers had to have degrees and prior management experience). If you are an intelligent, educated, skilled person, you need to be prepared to check that at the door because it will make the fresh-faced "leaders" resent you. They will feel the need to assert their power over you and make you look bad. Some management/supervisors are nepo hires. They tend to be the most reasonable because they are not in constant fear for their jobs. If you work near a conveyor belt for any length of time, no matter what your background includes, you will never be considered a candidate for an office role unless you can force them to move you for legal reasons (ADA compliance, for example). Once you work at the IC level in the warehouse, you are viewed as tainted. The few (very few) supervisors and managers who are internally promoted are desperate to look like they are doing work, so they implement temporary changes that negatively impact worker productivity. These changes last until that person is promoted or moved, and then workers are punished for the impacts of those changes. Managers and supervisors have been caught lying about IC metrics many times over. They adjust numbers to suit their needs that month. Transparency about performance is an illusion. Do not plan to make friends. Anything you share will be used by others to ingratiate themselves to supervisors/managers.