Pros
Flexible scheduling, will work with you to give you hours that don't conflict with school or your personal life. You can update your availability at any time electronically, dispute clock-in/clock-out errors to get the hours you worked, and request time off any time (as long as it's at least two weeks in advance) electronically in the breakroom. Depending on the store, you can get your schedule for next week as soon as Monday the week prior. If you work loss prevention, I believe you get schedules monthly. Easy to get cash handling and customer service experience through cashiering, opening cash office, or working as an area supervisor or a manager. Working hours aren't too crazy depending on the store you work at, with DD's I think the opening hours can be between 8am to 9:30am, to 9:30pm or maybe 11:30pm. Easier opportunities to open stores and really get a feel for what it means to develop a retail establishment. I've opened a few stores, and it was a wonderful opportunity. Can be easy to switch associate positions at will, depending on the store (I've worked cashier, fitting room attendant, stockroom, sales floor, I'm back-up SPS, I do markdowns, and I work markdowns). Can be easy to move up to full time or management, depending on the store Can develop good professional working relationships with upper level management/corporate Easy to transfer and change locations if necessary Fast paced, but a great place to start building up retail experience depending on the store. Newer stores don't get as much traffic between high volume seasons, but around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the summer it seems like no one has to worry about payroll anymore because we're always hitting sales or going above and beyond. You can either work a position where you're always moving, or you can work a position as a fitting room attendant or SPS where you spend most of your time in one spot, strictly working customer service. It's fun and very flexible. If you're being treated badly at work (I don't mean, you're not getting hours and you're not even trying to talk about it with management but have a stick up your rear end about it, I mean harassment and discrimination), you can call an anonymous hotline to report it and it usually resolves things without outing you. I think you can use that hotline or a different one to share ideas as well.
Cons
Some of this can only be seen on a store by store basis, so please take this and any other review on here (and other websites) with a grain of salt. Management struggles to communicate with corporate (district management, upper level loss prevention), each other and associates. The same goes for associates, with each other and management. Bad payroll, it always seems to be a struggle to provide adequate hours to each associate and have enough for full productivity. Some of it may be what corporate says is associates and supervisors in management not being completely productive when filling shifts, but I don't believe that accounts for all of it, especially when you open a store and see the associates develop and become proficient in their position, but strangely enough there still isn't enough time to keep everything up to standard for everyone. If you are asked to work a cash office position, prepare to lose all your hours and only work 1.5 hours in the morning, and probably not end up with a single day off because nobody else wants to work the position. I've asked so many times to work other positions, get a second person for cash office, but to no avail, along with other cash office associates. So please keep on guard if you're asked upon hire or later on, "would you like to work cash office?" I don't know if it's company standard to have cash office associates only work an hour and a half before opening every day, and only have one associate that they have to work every day, but I know that it happens often. So be careful. Maybe it's just me, but the way cashiers' performance is graded by Ross's standards doesn't work. I understand minimizing the amount of steps required to prevent shortage, but the timing doesn't work, and the electronic timer is anything but forgiving when it comes to customers contributing to your time going up and up. No customer wants to be called up while you're still assisting someone else. It does not work in my experience. Gossip is a major problem, not just at my store, and cashiers struggle to correctly count money in and money out of their register.