Pros
+Company is backed by union. Union will protect your job if the company tries to find a illogical reason to fire you. +Co workers who worked here were some of the best people I ever met. Almost everyone except two people in the entire store I had zero problems with. +Upper management in the store was very good. Friendly people who seemed to care about the employees who worked for them. +The work itself is rather easy when things go right.
Cons
-Constantly understaffed. There's not enough people to get anything done in a timely matter. People are having to do 5-8 different tasks throughout the day by themselves. It's not rare to see someone get called from another department to do the job of someone in a different department. -Minimum wage. It's a amount of money you get paid that you can't survive off of and it is sad to see how the company doesn't care enough about it's employees to pay more then minimum wage. Good hard working people exist at the bottom level and they shouldn't be getting paid only minimum wage. It's even sadder the union takes money from the minimum wage workers which makes those workers make below minimum wage. -Store frequently ran out of supplies needed to accomplish tasks. -You have to drop everything you're doing immediately if anyone asks for help or needs something done. This is a huge problem when you're constantly on a time limit for all your tasks and every minute counts. I would have to lie to customers sometimes so I could finish a task in time. I felt bad doing it, but there's simply not enough time to help out everyone. -No hope for long term career in Albertsons. Courtesy Clerks, Combos and Cashiers are not full time at all. Combo which is a step up from Courtesy Clerk gets paid the exact same amount of money. Needless to say, it's an absolute joke. Nobody wants to move up to combo from courtesy clerk since there's no benefit. Why would someone take a position of more responsibility with no pay increase or benefit to doing so? -Workplace politics. Certain things irritate certain people, but other people will get irritated if you don't do those same things with them. You'll have to learn specific ways to bag for people, when to help people, when not to and how to really not step on anyone's toes. -Inconsistent schedule. You'll never know what days you will and won't be working. -Extremely stressful job. Some days you'll be alone the majority of your shift since people frequently call in sick and a replacement can't be found in time. These days the amount of tasks you have to do is overwhelming and it's incredibly irritating. On these days you have to do the work of two people. You'll be doing work constantly nonstop without a moment to rest and almost not enough time to get the work done. -Some days I have skipped breaks because I can't take one because there's barely enough time to get my tasks done. Taking a break would set me too far behind on one task or another. -Albertsons is a revolving door. In the front end people don't stay for long. Lots of people have quit and I don't blame them. This makes it hard to keep quality employees who have been with the company and understand how to get the job done efficiently. Some people don't quit, but end up being forced to transfer to another store.