Walmart, but with better pay and benefits.
Pros
The pay is unmatched for the category of work that you do(max pay is equivalent to what you make as an AP/AR Accountant with a 2-year degree), and union benefits include health insurance that is paid for by your employer. If you get a position in an older store, it can be a pretty chill work environment.
Cons
Training is nonexistent, non personal, and has a "assembly line" mentality where they train you how to operate a register on a computer training program once, then they expect you to do your produce job perfectly because "you've been here for X years and you STILL don't know how to do your job". Management(the lazy ones) likes to hide in their offices for half their shift or more. The produce manager is pretty incompetent as far as the condition of his department is concerned. Often not seeing(or choosing not to see) blatant topping off of highly perishable goods(new product should be on bottom, with old and softer product placed on top of the new, NOT the other way around), until there's a puddle of soup on the tables with fruit flies swarming the mess, then he'll fly off on a rage looking for someone to throw under the bus. I would often find products just sitting in the back instead of on the shelves because my coworkers didn't cut them in on the tables. A worse case scenario would have organic products on the back while there are gaping wide holes on the organic displays, and boss man was working the previous day. This coming from a man who would frequently stand over my shoulder when I'm working and go through my work to make sure I'm throwing bad products away, and making sure the products I tossed out really merited being tossed out. Could have used that diligence with other coworkers. Management has a rather disgusting "blame the victim" mentality, even if they themselves created the problem in the first place. Helping out their front end to ring up customers when called for(and they WILL call you every 15 minutes) "is not an excuse not to finish your work". I'm evidently supposed to do 8 hours of work when I'm standing in front of a register 200 feet away for 4 of those hours. That would be on top of having to help floral blow balloons because management doesn't have the spine to point out the blatantly obvious to their customers, that while this is a 24-hour store, floral clerks are only available from 7 am to 7 pm, EVERY SINGLE DAY. Where's the line if we go down that route? Should I cut meat and fish because the customers want these fresh when the department itself is closed? Should I make sandwiches and deep-fried chicken because the customer is always right and wants them at 5 in the morning? I also like being told "it's your responsibility to take your break" and "it's not my problem", when I bring up the fact that my workload has become so onerous that I have to skip both my allotted breaks daily in order to give myself a half hour more to do my work. What I enjoyed the most is being told "you need to work FASTER". Gee thanks boss, wish I thought of that before routinely skipping my breaks and working through my lunch(and I'm not the only one who does this).
