Pros
Great people to work with, benefits are amazing, food is one of a kind. There are extremely dedicated employees who go above and beyond their duties to make sure the store is in the best shape it could be in.
Cons
I have seen this company go from what I considered a role model to other companies to being just one of the many rather than one of the few, as it used to be. Their ever- expanding market has created many different rules about your daily job that makes it impossible to properly communicate with one another. Due to the new healthcare system, you must work 30 hours versus the previous 20 to receive health insurance. Just about every other person hired at this particular store are southern baptists. Our captain has turned a blind eye to the tension this creates in the work environment. I have seen maybe four people of color hired during the time I've been employed there. Every single one of them has left eventually. There were about 70 people who opened our store and three years later there are about ten original hires left. I've heard other stores do not have near as high of a turnover rate as ours. Our store captain puts his personal views before the company's, by hiring mostly young religious white males (or their wives, or both), who receive better treatment than the older employees, and the female employees. The mates at this particular store are so miserable and it is a reflection of poor guidance from the captain. They're not properly trained, therefore crew members aren't properly trained. All of the original mates that opened our store have left (ten of them) to work at a different store because they knew months into the job that they were in no way going to receive a recommendation to move up in the company by this captain. If I were to write this review when I first started the job, it would have gone much, much differently. Many crew members who couldn't get an issue resolved by our captain took it to our regional director, who also turned a blind eye to their array of concerns. I worked with a gay man who came out as transgender two years into the job. As soon as she came out, her reviews were bad, her hours were cut, and the treatment from our management changed toward her. Prior to that, her reviews were always perfect. This is one of the many examples as to why Trader Joe's will either get worse, or if they start listening, REALLY listening, it could get better.