Pros
After putting in your time, wages aren't bad.
Cons
Working in the store, the general feel is that you're going to get stuck there. Most of the people that I encountered there had started working there as a temporary thing, but then stared earning too much money to go elsewhere. Most of the other courtesy clerks really didn't care about their job at all - at the end of the day, it didn't matter if you actually did your job or not. People who put in more effort didn't actually get rewarded for much at all. When I first started working at the store, it was required for one person to sweep the entire store every fifteen minutes. Such a task was only really possible if everything went right and the store wasn't busy. By the time I left, they had relaxed the rule, but then also said that if you didn't complete the sweep exactly as they wanted it then you'd get fired. Management at my store varied. I only liked one of my three managers (there was one store manager and two assistant managers). One of my assistant managers sat in his car on his lunch break watching me put away carts. Even though the person before me didn't put away any of the carts (leaving me with a bunch of carts to put back, which I wasn't sure I'd be able to do in an hour), he called the store to speak to one of the checkers to pull me away from my job to tell me that I wasn't putting away the groups of carts in the order that he wanted them to be put away. The second assistant manager - the one I liked - actually thanked me for doing my job and did what he could to make my experience there better. He was literally the only one there to consistently make sure people who did there jobs were appreciated in some small way. The manager himself was terrible at scheduling, more than once didn't follow union rules about hours, and wasn't very good at communication. The shops are a joke - for one, it's possible to complete the spirit of the shop without following it to the letter, but you'll still get penalized if you do. Basically, their mystery shopper system serves as an incentive for courtesy clerks to avoid customers like the plague. If you actually want to follow Safeway's rules, it means that you won't get to know any of your co-workers (unless you work in one of the departments). Additionally, the three-cart "loose" cart maximum in the parking lots is an unrealistic joke. I rarely ever see a Safeway on shop when it comes to carts. Lastly, the union is terrible. They asked me to sign a document saying I had read a piece of information they'd never given to me - and then threatened my job because they were taking too long to give me the necessary information to *legally* sign everything. Unions in opt-in states may be better run, but the one I had to be a part of was terrible.