Pros
Management is really good about working around school schedules. As a part-timer, I had semesters where I could only work Sat/Sun and they let me work 9 hour days on the weekend, essentially. Pay is good for Sam's in general, but at the Wake Forest store, pay is elevated (because it is the Market Club HQ. This means that the Market Team (including the Market Manager, Market Fresh Manager (etc.) (These are the bosses of the GMs) are stationed out of your club. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. There's more pressure to keep up standards, but you start at (I think a dollar) a higher rate of pay. The team is good. I enjoy working with them.
Cons
Once you open up your availability, you're more prone to getting 5+ day workweeks of 4,5,6 hour days (which are lame). I'd rather work four (8) hour days than 5 6.5 hour days. It's retail, so any pits and woes you can imagine with a retail job are here. Be prepared to work on most holidays (except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years (there's another holiday I'm forgetting...). Expect busier stores around the holidays too. Retail: Prepare to do, re-do, and re-do-again, your area depending on which boss/corporate/third-party rep is touring the floor. They all have their own preferred ways/or learned ways. They all expect their way to be the visible way when they walk through. Imagine yourself as a marionette, and each manager holds one string. Now picture every manager pulling the strings in different directions, all the while blaming you (or at the very least being blatant in their opposition) for moving in the direction of another string. [Hmm...this is actually a decent metaphor. I hope someone reads this. Are you real?][Am I real?] What really is lame is their (new?) automated system which sets the starting pay. I've been at the same club more than two years. I've gotten raises twice, but because Sam's just upped their company-wide minimum wage, my last increase was "big" only because it was getting us higher than the minimum. Anyway, a new associate was brought in and the system started them off at 2 dollars more than any other associate in the department because of (5 years total in retail and 1 year related in the department) experience. Two dollars more an hour and I could tell within an hour of training the associate (yeah, isn't that a nice way to end your training session) that it was a waste. It's not like I even asked the associate what they were making. It came out in natural conversation when we were discussing the potential certification which would bump our pay significantly over two years. "Yeah, I can't wait to make ___." [Does math in head...] Bringing in higher paid, new associates, meanwhile, those of us with proven performance are getting hours cut. Oh that's another con. Full or part time, prepare to have your hours cut at the whim of some magic number. Because that's the ultimate guiding light. Who cares if the store/department suffers because of cut hours and crap scheduling (another con; by crap scheduling, I mean overlap during days of little activity and ghost towns during busy weekends). So the department is suffering? At least we cut our payroll enough where its under some arbitrary limit. And don't think the standards go down just because there are fewer people working in the department. Listen, I like working here, but it can be a bear at times. I'm a fairly optimistic, glass-half-full person. Overall, the morale is pretty low, if I had to guess. But then again, if some kid comes in with "experience" and is making two dollars more an hour than you (and is making fifty cents less than a supervising associate) it's easy to see why morale would tank.
