Pros
The animals are the number one reason to work there. Our store provided high quality care to the ones we sell (spared no expense to make sick animals healthy, then adopting them out for free when they're well instead of selling them.) Not too many associates so you have the opportunity to get to know everyone pretty well if you choose. Cross-training is encouraged, but execution has more to do with available hours than willingness of team or management. Depending on your store, you may have excellent communication in-store. Communication with management on the district or regional level is spotty at best.
Cons
1) Dog poop. Customers don't clean up after their animals as they should and it's disgusting for the associates to have to. 2) Pay is not too great, and yearly "merit" raises hardly cover cost-of-living increases. Started in 2004 at $6.50 as cashier (high at the time.) Ended 2009 as a support manager at $10.13 (very low for the time.) So even though when I started the company it was one of the highest paying retail jobs, in those 5 years it got really bad. We had a stocker coming in at 4AM for less than $7 an hour before the minimum wage increased. Similar jobs bring in $10-15 depending on experience. 3)The salon is encased in glass and some customers knock on it and get the dogs riled up in the middle of a groom and resulted in a few cuts when dog reacted suddenly to being provoked. 4) Training could be better, especially in pet care. It was fantastic when I started, but it also went downhill in those 5 years. From what I've heard from rehires and those who'd been with the company for a while, this fluctuates and cycles. 2-3 years of excellent (and expensive) training, then 2-3 years with almost none. 5) Hiring people who'd never kept exotic pets for the pet care department. If you must, transfer a knowledgeable associate from another department who can learn while there. Don't throw some kid right out of high school with less than a week of training and expect him or her to identify obscure fish diseases. 6) Turn-over, especially for management, is pretty high. Ops and store managers are moved around with little to no warning, and not always for the better. 7) Micro-management from corporate is a pain, and their sales goals are on the high side, particularly with pet training sales. Projection numbers are put out a quarter in advance, so slumps aren't accounted for. And if everyone in a district cannot reach a certain goal consistently, perhaps it has nothing to your (normally excellent in over-achieving) salespeople being lazy, but the recession, instead. 8) Every manager I've ever had had difficulty firing associates. Even those that neglected animals (and even inadvertently killed them!) are normally just bounced from department to department and never really dealt with. Their hours are normally cut so low that they decided to quit, but I can think of a few who are still there and not getting the hint. Management shouldn't play games. Just get rid of them! 9) The scheduling system is awful! It schedules twice as many associates as we need during the slowest hours, but the weekends have almost no one at all!
