Pros
It's putting me through college/paying for my car Its close to home I can work in any fast paced deli environment in the country with the training/forced adaptation I've been through A handful of employees are tolerable. the people in my age demographic make shifts worthwhile At the store I'm at you can have as many hours as you like. Even more hours than you like actually. VERY EASY to change your availability for school or even another job so long as you give like 20 days notice. If you reach the interview step then you are hired. Seriously. If they call you in you already have the job ( background check pending of course) 10% discount on company products and 5% discount on everything else. You will gain tremendous experience in faking sincerity to complete strangers and learn very quickly how to pacify increasingly tense situations. After the first month or so you get used to passive aggressive remarks to the point that it doesn't even bother you or you become very apt at bottling the rage so you appear unaffected (remember you can not let them see you cry, if you cry, then they win). This job has made me more asocial than ever before but has made it very easy to fake pleasantries with others so i don't seem nearly as nervous or mean as i really am.
Cons
This union is useless except for underpaying employees on top of collecting a $30 union fee in the first week of each month. There are zero benefits for part timers and even the full timers have a pay cap of $14/ hour. And you don't even get to that point until you've been working for years. SEVERELY UNDERSTAFFED AND NO COMPENSATION FOR PICKING UP THE SLACK. This is not a "some days are easy some days are hard" kind of job, this is a "some days are hard and some days you are just waiting for someone to try something so you can go out with a fight" kind of job. I have been told by multiple managers that if i have to scream i should go into the back freezer and do it because customers are always right. I have never seen an employee get fired for it but on a monthly basis customers will come into the store and fabricate lies about employees to try and get free stuff and management always takes a customers side no matter how many employee witnesses state otherwise. My coworkers are racist and LGBT+phobic ( not really companies fault but the lack of sensitivity training sends mixed messages for a company trying to uphold a family friendly environment- i have heard a manager make rape jokes at work and a co-worker call the LGBT+ community Leftist BS. so i can't recommend this job to anyone with a clean conscious) No emergency training what so ever. Fellow employees (ESPECIALLY THE FULL TIMERS) are lazy and take bathroom breaks before their actual breaks so they get extra breaks in their shift, messing up everyone else's break times as well as time sensitive tasks. Do not pull any weight while claiming to pull all of the weight. Union doesn't do anything because they are designed to save jobs, also we are so understaffed that you could probably kill a man on the clock and not get fired just because we need the help. Management changes every 3 or so years which helps prevent nepotism but at the cost of getting a ill-fitting replacement who can't pull their own weight and is unused to working so hard. YOU WILL GET BURNS. and cuts. And bruises. I know a guy in meat market next door who lost a finger. This job is dangerous. People slip all the time and have to get very expensive surgeries to fix tweaked knees and broken wrists. You have to force the union to cover workers comp in court. It might not happen your first day, or even your fist month but i can assure you that every clerk has matching arm burns from the ovens. Lastly this company is wasteful. When a ceo or anyone of any slight importance schedules a visit there is a race to make sure every display is overflowing so we dedicate 2+ hours to preparing food that we'll have to toss the next day cause its expired just to uphold a lie of prosperity to management while ironically wasting resources. Every time some mook on top comes up with a new product plan for us to spend time dealing with it goes to waste, but we have to put it on the shelves because having full shelves is more important than cutting back on waste (i kid you not i could have paid for a full semester at any university in the state with the amount of food we scrap in one week in our department alone, i cant even begin to imagine what the grocery shrink looks like on a weekly basis.)