I work at Meijer as a cashier and a curbside (grocery pickup/delivery service) worker. From when I first worked at Meijer at January, it was a decent job, almost about 3 stars, simply doing cashier work. But as time went by, you see more of the cracks that make the job subpar:
1. Coworkers are unwilling to help out with anything, whether if they usually take breaks at times they are needed the most, or just refuse to help fix self-scans or answer questions about missing bar codes.
2. The point system is absolutely horrendous. To elaborate, Meijer punishes people by points if they are late or are unprofessional in their job. For example, late a few minutes? Half a point, no explanation justified. Calling in sick? One point. It takes a few points to get terminated, and if you're easily sick, just don't get a job here.
3. Managers always expect the finest work and pay you minimum wage. You will literally start at minimum wage and be expected to do better than your best. And when you do? You get an entry in a gift card raffle for 20 dollars. So, in other words, people are encouraged to try too hard for a minuscule chance to win 20 dollars you can only spend here.
And that is just the beginning. As the months went by, Meijer has been setting more and more rules for employees to follow and would give a tongue-lashing at anyone who would forget any of them.
1. Damaged credit cards could not be manually entered. This isn't bad at all, just one of the changes that really didn't do anything until the worse ones came in.
2. Gift cards could be no longer bought on self scans. This made lines at cashier lanes longer and just taken a good amount of convenience from the customer.
3. Forced hand scanning items. Meijer now wants you to hand-scan one item from each order in the self-checkouts, even if the self-scans are full and there is a huge line m, so you have to flag a customer down, scan something-even if it's a small cup of yogurt-then move to the next one. This is something the management here actually expects from its employees, when they are already busy fixing the horrid machines, juggling between customers to check id, check deals, call someone on an item that was supposed to be on sale, etc.
4. Unlimited item self-scans were removed. Now people who knew how to bag their own groceries had to go to cashiers and ask them to meticulously pack the bags in their way since they have no self scans to do that in anymore. The only good that came from this is that no one has to oversee those self-scans anymore.
5. Curbside's fee increased from 5 dollars to 10 dollars. Want to know how to make a service that 100 people a day use decrease to 60 people a day? Ever since this fee increase, less people are using curbside and more people are sent up to cashier, some of them have never even been properly trained on how to cashier either.
6. Cashier migration. For one reason or more likely the reasons I listed above, many cashiers were fired, quit, or just plain left. As a result, this made a strain on the remaining cashiers (including me) who were facing Black Friday levels of customers a day.
7. Overtime was taken away. Overtime is now heavily scrutinized and people who continue to put in overtime will be terminated. Now you have to punch in on the clock or corporate will personally speak to you and your future with Meijer.
That seems to be most of the glaring problems Meijer has, and honestly, I'm working at the flagship store. I'm shuddering in horror about how worse the other stores are, so if the best Meijer has to offer is horrendous, don't even think about working here, just go somewhere else like Aldi, Trader's Joe or any other small grocery,l.