Pros
-West Salem Deli workers receive sales commission and incentive pay -Beautiful food displays -Generally very delicious food -To-order grill food is surprisingly affordable compared to rest of store -Kitchen is spacious and clean -Low to medium-traffic days are very enjoyable -Fun coworkers -Decent benefits, 401k
Cons
The deli is set up as your everyday meat/salad deli, but it's also something akin to a restaurant. The grill is front and center, with only glass separating the customers from the workers making the food. It looks good, it attracts wandering customers to order food, but it also is not uncommon for an unruly customer to stand over the glass and direct workers on how exactly to make their food. Sometimes customers will try to strike up a conversation, or ask a few questions. This is all fine and dandy as long as we are not receiving a large amount of traffic. The customer-worker dynamic over the grill becomes exponentially more difficult the busier it gets. Rather than run the grill in a restaurant assembly line style, West Salem management enforces workers to take individual orders and work them. This leads to a lack of consistency in how the food is prepared, depending on which worker made it. Otherwise, during low-traffic times this isn't much of an issue, but during high-traffic times you can expect as many as 6-8 workers running around, bumping into each other in a tight space, trying to achieve their tickets. I'm always afraid I'll accidentally get stabbed with a kitchen knife or a meat thermometer in the frantic movement. God forbid someone messes up on an order, because the customer and nobody else will easily find out who messed up the order in the first place. I've seen this inefficient system cause customers to wait over 20 minutes for a small order of fries on busy afternoons. Formal training is non-existent, and believe me, there is a lot to learn and take in. Your first few days you'll be shadowing a worker, and might learn how to do half of what you need to know before you're on your own. Again, keep in mind every worker does certain things a little differently, causing a lack of consistency. A week in, you'll find yourself at the coffee bar with a customer who wants a dry latte breve, or a customer who wants to pay at the register with part-card-part-cash. You won't know how to do any of this, because your teacher didn't have the time or opportunity to show you. Everybody will be busy helping their own customers and your customer will berate you for being incompetent. The customer base in this store often is very snobby, toxic, and confrontational. The deli "soft closes," which means even when the grill shuts off, and everybody should be in clean-up mode, somebody can order a cold sandwich, ask for a case salad, or ask for meats to be sliced. Enough of this can set you behind dramatically. Management hates it when you get out late, and loves to inform you that it wasn't *that* busy of a day, so you should have no excuse, but when you have people after hours still asking for food, there is literally nothing that you can do. Upper management is constantly adding more things to the menu than they remove. This adds more stress to the workers for very little reward. Creating quantity over quality in menus is a common mistake in failing restaurants. The points of contact with customers are numerous. You have the coffee bar/cash register, the grill, the hot case, the meat case, the cold case, the drive thru window, and whatever service requests you might have at the seating area, the reach-ins, or the salad bars. Staffing comes up short in accommodating all these locations sometimes, especially later at night. In closing, management clearly has great plans for this deli. It looks great, and makes good food. They just want to keep adding more features to this department and don't want to take the time to think about logistics in staffing. It's stressful. And for that reason, I would steer clear of this department -- especially in the West Salem branch. [Side note] Outside of the deli, most of prices here are mind-bogglingly high. I've seen bags of grapes (non-organic) go for $15 each and the cheapest chapstick you can buy is $3 something. This company encourages their employees to shop here to "keep the money in the local community," while paying most of their long-standing employees far less than the average market. The execs are usually impersonal and rude. For this reason, I'd recommend avoiding this company all together, not just the deli.
