Pros
Old Navy is a nice first job. It was my first job. It is a great job if you don't have any bills to pay or are looking for a nice hobby job. The discount is quite amazing at Gap and especially Banana Republic.
Cons
The pay is horrible, for the amount of work they expect you to do is ridiculous. I am a firm believer of 'minimum wage, minimum effort.' If they would pay their associates more, such as an efficiency wage of $8.50hr they would have a lot less turnover and more experienced workers. But Gap Inc, does not like to pay. They are ridiculously cheap. When I started in 09 the job was great, I had plenty of hours and we had a closing crew of 6-7 people on MONDAY nights. Now fast forward 2 years to 2011 and we have 3-4 people closing on MONDAY nights. They have consistently raised the bar when it comes to working. They expect us to do more with the same pay and they always cut our hours. All they care about is the stupid old navy credit cards. I was the top performer for my store for 9 months in a row and I never got a promotion. I got 2 star bucks gift cards in all those 9 months of card getting for them. They expect you to care about getting the cards, but i feel that those who want the card will ask for it. The card is great if you pay it off when you get it, but if you cannot the interest will kill you, 23%. If you didn't get cards you didn't get hours. So sometimes we associates had to ask people who should not get cards to sign up and when they didn't get approved it would lower their credit score. I feel that is unethical. Now the other thing they care about is the Customer Experience Survey. I got 109 compliments in 5 months which is amazing because no one ever does the survey, but I got written up because 1 person wrote a negative comment about me. So my 109 compliments doesn't mean anything to them. The last thing about Old Navy is the minimum number of associates policy. It requires stores to have 50 employees. So if 'corporate' decides they will give us 500 hrs that week the managers each get 40 hrs and there are 5 of them, so that is 200hrs just for managers. So the rest of the 45 employees have to fight for the remaining 300 hours. It is truly pathetic. In the end Old Navy will eat the last vestiges of your soul and leave you bitter and disillusioned.