Pros
One of the best ground level management styles you will find in retail. Kaizen people. Most employee are treated better than they realize here. Trader Joe's caps out their part timers at (when I was there) almost $18.60/hour with regular cost of living increases (wow!). The majority of the work is bagging groceries, stocking shelves, and cashier duties -- for almost $20 an hour people when you take benefits into account!!! That's better than managers in a lot of places. Not gonna find that anywhere else even in a good economy. Good health care kicks in if you work over 25 hours a week and they were extraordinarily flexible on scheduling. If you stick around, they appear to take care of you. You get what amounts to a .50-.90 cents raise every six months, all you gotta do is kiss a little butt and always say yes to whatever they ask you to do. "Clean the bathroom? No problem, where is the toothbrush." There is a reason they have so many people that never leave, there is nothing better out there.
Cons
Some employees believe that they are entitled to be less than the best because they have been there for years. Again, I was working at 10/hr next to people who were giving a fraction of the effort and customer service and they were making nearly double. This is retail people, the next customer might be your last. The smile-- not really an option-- the attitude-- not too much flexibility. You have to be nice and you have to be friendly or you are in the wrong business. So many LT employees just sucked at talking normal to customers. They never fired anybody for anything less than the most egregious of offenses however, if you had a personality problem (and everyone knew who they were) then they put you in the back or in the box (refrigerated section). Lots of whiny overcompensated part timers and there were more than a few whiny full timers. Try and take that attitude somewhere else and see what happens. Apparently the full timers were unhappy that many new management recruits were from outside of the company. I was a part timer so I was not effected directly. A lot of entitlement issues for the folks here.