Pros
There are some really good people that you could call friends. Above average benefits shows the company cares about its associates and the pace is perfect from a work/life balance with the daily exodus beginning at 4:15. The strategic plan instituted by the CEO makes entirely good sense for what the company needs to do to grow, although the concern would be at each of the executive, management and executional levels where it is questionable if the right bodies are in place to make it succeed.
Cons
Overall, the company possesses a very unhealthy obsession with Ace Hardware to the point of having emulated or even duplicated many of its programs instead of striving for innovation and uniqueness and its own point of differentiation. Many departments are not without its own idiosyncrasies. For example, Corporate Communications operates in a frenzied, schizophrenic unplanned pace often deluging others with 11th hour nearly impossible requests. And of course, you can’t spell Marketing Department without including the letters “d.r.a.m.a.” There’s always some form of theatrics played out by the same certain individuals who probably do not belong in a position of middle management/program responsibility. Then there is the COE which is typically referred throughout the company as the Center of (in)Effectiveness, Center of (in)Efficiency, Center of Euphemism, etc. No one seems to know who is behind leading this department and what it actually does considering the power it holds within the company. The distribution of workload is disproportionately unequal. Some teams carry the majority of the weight on their backs because their partners prefer to do the bare minimum in return, as such as the case where some associates job descriptions could be described as “getting others to do their work for them.” In other instances, some of this burden of work can be directly traced back to questionable programs derived from various individuals/teams other than to promote job justification.