Pros
Salary range for ASM is higher here than other big box stores. If you have a senior management team that supports each other, it makes for a great work environment. No overnights in most stores. 401K match is pretty good. If you contribute 6%, they match 4.5%. Bonus potential is up to 30% of salary, although the trend across the company has been to reduce bonus potential in favor of a slight salary bump lately, so that could change any time. Your authority level depends on how much authority you command, meaning if you want to be a real leader, you can be, and if you want to just coast and do a lot of your employee's work yourself, you can. My Store Manager is great, but not everyone is so lucky. If you invest in your own training and become an expert on policy, procedure, and the tools/systems we use, you will be instantly seen as a rockstar with limitless potential. Unfortunately, not many ASMs put in that effort to learn and go years just getting by. Compared to other big box retailers, we have WAY more payroll hours to spend. Of course hourly employees still complain about being over worked, but in comparison to Walmart or Target, we have it easy.
Cons
The insurance dropped to a 70/30 or 60/40 coverage depending on the plan you choose. The schedule is based on a 4 week rotation, so you always know when your days off will be, but the shifts very wildly. In at 5am one day and closing the store at 10pm the next. HR oversteps their bounds on almost everything. They answer to an area HR manager, so it's difficult to rein them in, even when you are clearly right. Because of their current overreach, ASMs currently have very little input on who works in their departments, who should be interviewed, corrective actions, etc. For $75K per year after bonus, I think I'm capable of interviewing my own Head Cashier candidate. The good news is, the company is slowly eliminating store HR Managers region by region in favor of a central HR office, so the company is addressing it. Performance is extremely difficult to manage for hourly employees. It can take up to a year to work through the process of releasing a poor performer. An accidental safety violation can get you in a heartbeat though. LP is a joke. They do absolutely nothing but key in RWDs (reports of what the management team and employees did to stop thefts) in order to show a return on the investment for their own payroll. We let any thief walk out the door with $2,000 in tools, then return it for store credit no questions asked. They can then easily sell that gift card to any pawn shop for 80% of face value. If a manager does anything but smile and approve the return, LP will not investigate the theft, but instead throw the manager under the bus for not following the return policy. Our bonus potential depends on sales and NBT of the store, but we have to allow blatant theft and then approve huge returns of stolen items that subtract directly from our sales. When 1% of sales performance can mean $2,000 in my yearly bonus, that lack of support is maddening. The CSC (Corp office) is extremely out of touch with what actually goes on inside a store. On the internal social media platform we use, the stores are constantly begging for help on issues, but the CSC staff are more concerned with why they can't wear a certain kind of sandal to work or throwing a tantrum because a company event (all hands day) was scheduled during an obscure Jewish holiday. They are completely oblivious to how that sounds to the stores when we work every holiday but Christmas.