Meijer Reviews

- The pay is low for the industry (across all roles), and the structure in place for raises and merit-based performance is just controlled by mid-to-upper management. It's not tied to your actual performance. If the company is doing really well you can expect maybe a 3% raise. If the company doesn't meet it's financial goals, 0-1% is more likely. - There's a culture of promoting from within for most roles, but it never seemed to be in a way that made sense. People end up being managers and directors or areas where they have no core competencies. Most of the key players in merchandising and marketing don't have any backgrounds to oversee those areas. - Almost every decision made on a daily basis is done-so by the personal opinion of someone in management. In my many years being there I can only recall 1 business decision being made based on consumer-insight data, and not something the management had a strong personal preference on. - They are an extremely techno-phobic organization. They avoid using successful third-party services to do key business functions (like Analytics, or Project Management software), and instead have everything developed internally by Meijer IT people much to the detriment of the employees. They don't seek out aid from outside organizations, and seem very fearful of any "confidential" information leaking out. Be prepared to use custom apps for everything in old versions of Internet Explorer in order to do day-to-day tasks. - The techno-phobia also spills out into their web presence. Which, in 2016, is still almost nothing. You can't buy products from them online. You can browse a very limited version of their merchandise from the site, but only to add it to an order to find a store near you. Or in some selection locations, pick up at the store via a curbside service. - Strict dress code. When they added 'jeans on Friday' it was a big deal, because Meijer is still one of the few places that requires a pretty formal business attire for everyday work. - Traditional to a fault. Meijer's culture is very puritan in the way it reacts to and treats people who aren't heterosexual white people. If you're a member of the LGBT community or a minority, you will get a strong sense of being treated differently, and probably have lesser benefits for things like medical when it comes to your partners. They didn't officially revise their non-discrimination policy to include sexual orientation until 2009. - Everything is done in a reactionary way. Meijer is always chasing the tail of competitors like Target and Kroger, but not in the 'analyze the competition' type of way. Long term forecasting and following of trend data are not followed in favor of decisions being made based on something that leadership saw while out in the world, and then a reactionary plan will be thrown into place. However due to how slow projects are to mobilize, by the time it's complete they continually appear 2-3 years behind the trend curve of what the world is doing. - Terrible allocation of resources by leadership to make a couple select stores which are local to the senior leaders look nice, while the rest of the chain looks terrible. Stores like Knapp's Corner and Cascade will have reinvention and remodel year after year, while stores in other areas struggle to get the paint on the walls redone, and signage that is decades-old removed. - The culture at the corporate office is toxic. It's driven by gossip, and over-sized egos of management trying to keep people in their place. Meetings are always filled with trying to figure out what was done wrong last, and lots of blame being passed around. There is also no accountability from upper management. Any mistake or miscalculation is passed down to the lower workers and blamed on them. For example: Leadership requesting a special 'drop everything' project to do something at one of their key stores like Knapp corner -- only to turn around a month later and complain that the employees messed up their other project timelines and budgets as a result by spending too much resources on the special project management asked for. - Very meeting-heavy culture. The calendars of most people are booked 50-70% of each day, and if you're in management or leadership you're probably looking at 100% most days, with double-and-triple booked moments. A majority of most of the meetings is spent trying to recap or figure out what happened since the last meeting. Very little process or action items ever get addressed. - No dissenting opinions are allowed. Multiple times during my time there I was told of a decision that was made by leadership that would have to be passed on. We were told to never speak ill of the decision, and never ask questions. Even on small matters, if someone 'higher' on the organization chart than you said something, you are supposed to agree with it, full stop. Any time questions or concerns are raised, you can probably expect to get spoken to afterward about being 'difficult.' - Poor communication and organizational alignment. It really feels like on a day-to-day basis that each segment of the business is at war with the others. Each has different leadership and objectives, and none of them every seem to align. So where merchandising leadership would want X, Marketing leadership would want Y, and space planning leadership would want Z. Each respective group would demand their outcome of their employees, and leave the lower staff to argue it out. In the end, the result is always a poor blend not meeting anyone's objectives, and everyone involved can be seen as failing for not having met their objectives. - Most areas of the business have people quitting often (due to reasons stated above), and therefore there is very frequently a workload burden on the remaining employees. It will take months to hire someone new, and during that time employees will be expected to do the work of multiple people. People arriving at 7am, not taking a lunch, and leaving by 6 or 7pm that night was very common. Every day. -Little 'off' time. By saying that they are a 24-hour store, and the employees of the store don't get a break, Meijer likes to reinforce a culture of never taking time off. You're expected to react at all hours of the day or night, and there any almost no corporately observed vacation days other than the 6 or so national ones. - The HR department is basically a non-entity. When asked questions they always give vague answers, and are unable to speak to the actual policies in place that are driving their communication. Twice during the time I was there employees surfaced concerns to me that I needed to loop HR in on. Those concerns were immediately surfaced to the people who were in the complaint via email. So when an employee tries to anonymously get help with an issue with a superior, HR just copies the superior and the subordinate on an email together about the complaint and disappears. - Almost no diversity at all. The corporate campus is made up of about 95% or more white people. There's a handful of minorities here and there, but if you were to pick any random sample of employees, the overwhelming majority would be white. While there I heard someone in leadership try to paint it as a reflection of West Michigan in a meeting, but it's not even close. - Micro-management of every task. There are very few decisions that can be made on a day-to-day basis without the approval of senior leadership. This culture results in many extra hours of work for employees making up review documents explaining their decisions to leadership. Every area has an approval process which is laborious and involves 3 or more layers of people to go through before anything can be considered 'approved.' -If you're in need a job desperately you could probably get a job here and not mind it too much depending on how invested you get. Be sure to negotiate and come in at as high of a salary as possible if you do because your pay will likely never go up in any meaningful way while there. However, I would strongly advise anyone who takes pride in their work, or who has a 'get it done' mentality to look elsewhere. Meijer is a culture of strict orders down to the dress code, and doesn't take kindly to people going against the grain on anything. It is a corporation in every sense of the word, and every strange or awful corporate behavior you can think of is alive and well here, amplified to a tremendous degree.

The pay is awful. I asked for 12 dollars an hour in my interview, and they basically laughed at me saying that the top out pay is only $9.60. I then came back with, "I guess i could handle $9.50 if i have a steady 40 hour work week." Finally after two and a half weeks of calling and them saying i had the job, but the store directer is on vacation, so i have to wait until he returns to start, they offered me $9.10. I worked as a cake decorator for all of a week and then they pushed me over to the baking side, which after a couple of months i found out is what they do to almost all new hires. Which brings me to my next point about how all of the managers lie, are disrespectful, and incompetant. They DO NOT know how to do their employees jobs, but feel entitled to respect, and not to the point of just sucking up, but more or less bowing down and kissing their feet. A child could walk around the store all day talking on their little handheld phones pointing out where spots are empty, but my boss can't even write on a cake or put bread into the bread slicer, and pull a handle to slice the bread. The "blue shirts" sit over in the cafe on their butts for half of their shifts and make lots of money for doing it, while the "red shirts" bust their butts to get everything finished. There is supposed to be all kinds of room for self improvement and promotions, but the ones who are rewarded are the same people who i clean up after everyday and don't even perform their current jobs correctly. I have asked several times about how to get promotions and what i need to do differently and no one seems to be able to tell me anything except that i already do satisfactory work. When talking to a former bakery employee who had previously transferred out i asked, "How did you get out of here?" He responded "You do a good job and obey their orders, don't you?' I responded with, "Well yes...?" He continued to say that if i do my job correctly and perform to their standards i'll be stuck in the bakery forever, becasue it's hard to find people that will do their jobs satisfactory, so why would they let me go anywhere else? Also the bosses lie to their employees promising raises for perfoming more than their regular duties and even bribe them with promotions and not follow through, so they can get bigger bonuses, by cutting back on their staffing. They bosses ask one to do impossible tasks and still expect one to get their regular tasks done on top of it. OVERWORKED AND UNDERPAID doesn't even start to describe it. I am suppoed to recieve two 15 minute paid UNINTERUPTED breaks. Everytime i try to take a break though i have a manager telling me to clock back in and help customers, because they only schedule 1 person for the last 6 hours that the bakery is open. Days off is a very bad situation at Meijer. It's nearly impossible to get off 2 days in a row, and sometimes you can be scheduled 9 days straight, on top of that you cannot request off holidays in most departments nor weekends. 40 hours a week does produce a decent pay check, but if you need three days off in a week for any reason and you usually work 40 hours, you're screwed! We do not get sick days at all that i know of, been there almost a year. Instead we get TMAGs (Team Member At A Glance). These are basically a point system. if you get one and don't get another it takes 30 or 60 days for them to fall off, but if you do get another it takes 90 days. After the fifth you are suspended and get a paid day to "think about what you've done wrong." Then they don't drop off for a year. TMAGs have to be doing the same thing though, like clocking in over 2 minutes and 1 second late 6 times. Write ups are supposed to punish the bad, but at Meijer they don't really mean or do anything. I've worked with a person who used to get written up two and three times a day for not doing her job properly, and not even trying to and she's still there. Meijer is made for the rich to get richer and the poor to stay poor. If you are a goal motivated person and are looking to move up in the world, DO NOT WORK AT MEIJER, it will only slow you down and be a major setback and waste of time when you look back on it.