At Safeway, you are a pawn, and you are treated as such, even with experience.
Pros
Great benefits: full medical, full dental, full prescription, 10% off of Safeway brand products, paid vacations, and occasional free samples of new products. Flexible scheduling: as long as you don't request holiday weeks, you can usually get days off you desire with valid reasoning.
Cons
Safeway's insistence on "diversity" is abused by some managers. If you are a white male trying to get promoted, good luck. Safeway employees receive no hands-on training. They throw you in the job and expect you to figure it out. This works out fine for introductory level employees, since they can generally learn pretty quickly, but it leads to incompetent management, since managers receive the same sort of "figure it out" training. I've found that a lot of managers at Safeway have no idea what the right way to properly coach people to perform better is. Rather, they rely on indirect threats, intimidation, and setting unreachable standards to get employees to perform at a higher level. This employers does not care about you, no matter how long you've dedicated to the company. Safeway's service program is over bearing and over emphasized. You will never hear about anything good you do, but only what else you can do better. There is NO reward for hard work. Raises are all set and occur due to hours. No one will get a raise based on performance, unless promoted (which there is no reasonable system for either). It takes forever for pay to be respectable. You can not make a decent living on most jobs Safeway has to offer, until you've worked there at least 5 years.
