Pros
It may not be the most awful job in the world.
Cons
Being a Meijer employee is a mentally draining and physically exhausting fight to keep both your sanity and your self worth. You are essentially fighting losing battles on two fronts: with customers and with Meijer as a company. On the company side, they start out by lying to you; giving you deliberately false information about what hours you are expected to work, how much you will make hourly, what kinds of benefits you may get, and how advancement is possible for anyone who puts the hard work in. Once you've settled, they'll immediately renege on anything and everything they told you. Prepare to work nothing but time you're not available for, either less or more hours than you want, for an hourly rate beneath what you were promised, and for people who do not give a flying care about your ability to do the job. Managers are largely incompetent at everything except pleasing the corporate suits despite holding their positions for longer than you've been alive. At least once a week they'll dish out random, nonsensical, downright paradoxical, and largely nebulous requirements for you to follow- which boils down to making store numbers look better while you do the jobs of two-to-three people. Nothing will ever be clearly explained to you but you best believe they will let you know every five minutes when you're not doing what they expect. Favoritism is so rampant it's sickening: the new kid who has never worked a job before in their life will be promoted to an authority position and be allowed to get away with things that employees who have worked for years would be instantly fired for (ie. taking 'found' money or gift cards). Then, as icing on the cake, they'll constantly inundate you with Meijer corporate propaganda: video loops in the break room, posters, reminders, stickers everywhere you look, key words or phrases that have no meaning but managers use to judge you, stripping away your work space and filling it with impulse purchase fodder, and best of all, you'll have to listen to horrifying, obnoxiously loud smarmy commercials and jingles that repeat endlessly, hour after hour on the worst 'radio station' you've ever had the displeasure of being forced to absorb. And that's just the corporate side. Customers are their own unique brand of soul sucking, brain numbing torture, but that's easy enough to understand: Everyone, from the richest to the poorest, needs to eat. And they'll all come through your lane or self checkout. Realistically, most customers are not that bad; borderline annoying at worst. However, the longer you work the more those 'normal' customers seem to come and go without notice and it's the worst ones who seek you out day after day. Be prepared to be whatever anyone expects you to be at any time, regardless of what you're doing, what you're getting paid to do it, or whatever problems or issues you might be facing. You'll be expected to be: a therapist, a babysitter, an arbitrator, a translator, a mind-reader, a civil clerk, the fastest person in the world, a reminder, a customer service robot, a 'smile' emoji, an abused spouse, a punching bag (both verbally and physically), a facilitator of THEIR employment, an intervention host, a moist towelette, a garbage collector, a tour guide, a hearing aid, a mom who cleans up, a phone operator, an asset protection specialist, a walking encyclopedia, a virus carrier, etc, etc. You'll be required to shop for the customer, figure out their financial situation for them, help them with government aid so their kids can eat and they can still afford their alcohol knowing that the bulk of your check is going into their mouths via taxes while you yourself can't afford to buy the food they're spending their EBT on. If it can be summed up simply: you are expected to be a perfect servant who fulfills their every need because they somehow believe that the less than $100 or so they spend at your store every so often entitles them to treat you as such. You can't talk back, you can't explain, you can't speak in anything but a 'pleasant' tone, you can't be a human, you can't have feelings, you can't even HELP them without being required to sit there with a brown nosing look on your face while they tell you how worthless you are because you're a cashier despite the obvious fact that they are so inept at even basic life functions if it wasn't for you they would die of starvation. Prepare to have your humanity stripped away. Everyone is allowed to treat you like garbage and you are required to take it with a smile. If all that doesn't kill you, the simple repetition of it all will. ...or you become a lifer. But let's not add coworkers into the picture as I fear it's already pretty bleak.