Pros
-Great customer base; almost every single regular there is an absolute sweeheart or one if the coolest people you'll ever meet. - The people who work in the stores are fantastic at what they do. Not only are they great to work with, but they always strive to have the best customer service. They are one of the sole reasons as to why there's 2 stars here.
Cons
- There is a very high learning curve that they expect you to learn in a very shirt period of time. It's a very different retail experience, so it's kind of jarring when they advertise it as a "starter job". - There are a lot of small rules that exist solely for the purpose of making more money, that are entirely unfair. They have a rule where employees are only allowed to put one strip of tape on a box. If a customer needs more, they either need to buy tape or pay them to tape the box for them. - Christmas means 6 day work weeks for almost all of the employees, unless they are sick or are in school. They have done this several years in a row, and don't allow employees to take personal time off for basically the entire month of December. - The owners have a nasty track record of screwing over their managers, and do not offer any benefits whatsoever (even to said managers who work 40+ hours a week, or even 50+!). Some of those managers are put on "salary" for only 25k a year. Some people never even got sick leave, despite never using it. - Area managers are practically forced to go around their many stores across Washington AND Oregon, partially because they don't want to hire a decent sized staff for all of their stores. - Speaking of staffing, they normally have a staff of about 2-3 people working in the stores at a time, and almost never any more unless it's Christmas time. There's also been a huge span of time where they've only had one employee in the store ALL DAY because it "wasn't busy enough to justify having another person in there". Said employee was also not allowed to close down the store for their lunch breaks, either, so they never got a break in that entire 10+ hour shift. This went on for months. - If you are working in the Silverdale store, you HAVE to take the USPS mail to the post office down the street in your own vehicle. They do not compensate you for this, and they do not have a company vehicle dedicated to do this. - The owner can be downright rude and abusive at times. He has threated multiple employees that he would fire them (this extends to the area managers, who basically run the stores for him) and sometimes verbally abuse them, and some of them he has told people straight to their face that they are expendable and easily replaceable. While this doesn't happen ALL the time, the fact that it has happened more than once is very telling. - The area managers are often so streched out and stressed because of how many stores they have to take care of, that it's practically a wonder that anything gets ordered. Sometimes we'd submit an order for something as simple as paper towels, and it wouldn't get there until two weeks after you ordered it. Transit time not included. There are even some stores that they refuse to buy necessary tools for because they "don't deem it necessary for them". This probably doesn't even cover everything that I can possibly list as a negative. Most of these were just off the top of my head. I will admit though, as a regular associate, you don't get to experience a ton of all that I listed, especially the "being screwed over" part. If you keep your head down, you'll usually be fine, but it gets hard to watch when a bunch of people around you start deteriorating because of it.