Pros
There are some very significant benefits to working at CVS, particularly if you are working through college or a young adult at the beginning of your career. My store manager was always willing to work with me when I needed to change my availability. I started as Photo Lab Supervisor and eventually switched to Shift Supervisor-A which were both technically full time positions, but I ended up having to drop down to part time several times over the 3 years I worked there in order to keep up with my studies. I did lose my benefits a few times because you have to keep your 12 week average above 30 hours to keep full time benefits but I never had to drop down to a lower position and always kept the same pay. Store discount was also pretty good, 15% on everything, and I think it was 30% on CVS brands. Of course everything is overpriced at CVS anyway, but when buying simple household supplies and food this did make life easier because the CVS brands are actually pretty good and with the discount were pretty cheap.
Cons
I can only think of two downsides to working at CVS. The first is something you'll deal with at any retail establishment but particularly at stores of a similar size. There is always a lot to do, from setting up planograms, to printing photos, to helping customers find things, and even stocking shelves and running the registers. Unless you work in the pharmacy, you will be responsible for doing ALL of these things if you work at a CVS, and don't get your hopes up about the pharmacy being better because they have their own set of stressful issues to deal with all day. With most CVS stores only keeping a few employees in the store at a time, you have to run back and forth between the projects you are asked to work on and helping customers. This becomes easier after doing it for a while, but it also leads me into my second point. The miscommunication between store level management and above, ie. the district and regional management teams, is atrocious. The district manager tried to work with us somewhat, but on the rare occasions that a regional manager came in, I got the idea that he had absolutely no idea how a retail store was actually run and what it took to keep things going. Like I said a moment ago, payroll limits the amount of labor hours so that whoever makes the schedule can only have 3 or 4 people in the store at the busiest times and usually only 2 at less busy times of the day. The upper level management will flip a **** if you schedule anyone over 40 hours or go over total payroll, so there's no way around this BUT they will also flip out if they come into the store and every single item is not pulled forward on the shelf, if there is a single damaged box of merchandise, or if a cashier is not standing at register 1 at all times. Little do they know that accomplishing their other goals would be impossible if one of the two people in the store was standing at the register throughout their entire shift. I was a shift supervisor so I was somewhat responsible for making everything presentable during visits from the DM and RM and we managed to do alright, but I have to admit, a lot of it was smoke and mirrors. We neglected other things in order to schedule people to clean the store up before visits. They are also completely inept at mediating any type of problem that a customer goes to corporate with. No matter how well you do in retail, someone will eventually get upset about something and call the corporate office to complain. The problem with CVS is that they would give us a set of rules and tell us to follow them to the letter, make no exceptions, if a customer is upset try to placate them, but make sure you follow the coupon rules, the refund policies, etc. Some of the policies are kind of ridiculous and by following the rules and not making exceptions you irritate the customers. Then they call corporate and corporate calls you saying why did you do this... the answer is usually that they told you to do it previously, but if you say that they'll just get even more annoyed and then change the policy only to switch it back when the paperwork looks bad.