Pros
The orientation is nice--they give out free milk and donuts. It's pretty easy to get hired as a food service associate because it sucks to manage a store without someone doing dedicated food work. Each store is different, but at mine, there was a radio in the back that I could listen to while I made food. And the company as a whole seems to legitimately care about the customers and giving to the community (or at least pretended to in orientation), which is nice.
Cons
After orientation, you're completely at the mercy of the individual store managers, which sucks if your managers don't communicate or insist on different rules or just generally aren't great managers. The main manager at my store had no idea what he was doing or what information to give his employees. Because I was the food service associate, he told me NOTHING about the rest of the store, so when customers asked me questions all I could do was direct them to cashiers. He also didn't show me the trend charts for the food so all I had to go on to know how much food to make was what he and the other manager told me--and they disagreed a lot, so I followed different rules for each day. At one point, he told me to leave food out unheated and only bring it out when I'd filled up an entire tray, which was against health regulations, but until I told him a superior of his who had contact with the headquarters had seen it, all he said was "It's my store and we're going to do this my way." There seems to be no procedure for voicing complaints to HR about bosses or asking to be moved to another store without actually talking to the store managers, or I would've done it. Unfortunately, the only opportunity for promotion for most people involves becoming a manager or assistant manager, which doesn't suit those of us who aren't interested in those positions. Also, managers have to work 60-70 hours per week. As frustrated as I was with the management at my store, I can understand WHY they had so many problems after working so much. There was some kind of drama going on with the upper management that was causing trouble for those of us in the trenches, and they wouldn't LISTEN to any of the store managers. It seems like there are a lot of power trips going on. Oh, and only store managers get commission, so there's not much incentive for excellence among employees. It drove me crazy that the way it was set up, you either did it right or you did it wrong--there was no room to be amazing.
