stocking associate

cashier

retail sales associate

produce associate

order picker

Festival Foods

A typical day of work in the Festival Foods bakery involves packaging thousands of buns, breads, pastries and various confections.  It was a sweet job, with sweet people, especially around the holidays.  Mind you, it was the holidays and the weekends that really pushed its workers to the limit.  
Sadly, my personal experience at Festival Foods is tainted by the poor scheduling and overall unrest regarding managerial intervention.  The schedules that we worked by were erratic at best, and released at the manager's leisure (which might not have been a bad thing if our managers didn't procrastinate quite so much), often fraught with mistakes; some people would be scheduled beyond their availability, previously approved days off were disregarded, and workers were often scheduled too few or too many hours.  While scheduling is, I am sure, exhausting and time-consuming, these issues were rarely resolved within a timely manner, if at all.  Management has also, in general, proven to be trying in my experience in and of itself.  In my two-and-a-half years' experience at Festival Foods, I worked with three managers, with only one of them having any experience in the field.  Every time someone new took the position, work was inhibited because the new boss decided to change every policy imaginable, regardless of efficiency, cost, or sensibility.  I ended up leaving because of the aforementioned grievances, with many coworkers following suit out of frustration from the inability to conduct our work.  
My coworkers, in fact, were lovely people with great senses of work ethic and compassion to each other and to customers.  We worked together very well, taking into consideration each ones' strengths and weaknesses in the workplace to best maximize our time and energy while making the environment relatively pleasant and satisfactory.  Working with the people I had made each day worth going in to work, and was the highlight of my employment at Festival Foods.  
The hardest part of working there was keeping up with the demands of holidays and weekend excursions.  The sheer quantity of orders to be placed, filled, and delivered in a timely and courtious manner was exhausting, though I personally found the energy bracing if not an enjoyable element of the job.  I found monotony to be my worst enemy, and nothing snuffs out monotony like the winter holiday rush for fruitcake and Christmas cookies or the last dash to pick up some buns and sweets for the summer picnic.  
If there was anything I took away from my time at Festival Foods, it would be that I gained a sense of familiarity with customer service, improved my customer/employee social skills, and learned how to work with grace under pressure.

Buyer Beware! I took this job due to wanting to learn more about a particular field. I was shot down on so many levels that I have sincere doubt I will ever pursue it again. 
 The directors,owners etc are all right but there is SO much micromanagement! Managers here are useless!  One snotty manager contacted  people from my old job and started super private rumors about me in the store. She laughed openly with other workers about EXTREMELY private stuff I never ever told anyone about. I contacted HR and they did nothing at all when she should have been fired. On my first few weeks there, I asked the asst manager if she knew how to do something (because I did not know) and she just responded "no I don't know." any other place I have worked the managers were required to know how to do everything in their department. 
I became friends with several very talented people who really loved what they did and busted their buns just like I did to fill the cases, etc. as we were all in the same boat,and we were just treated like dirt and told by managers to make more,more,more or that "the product is not good enough because of etc." every time. They throw away so much food that it is so gross! The production sheets/par counts are ridiculous. I once put out everything and it was gone in two hours. I was told to "go make some more" like we have an endless supply of product that takes hours to produce,when I am the only one there to make it. It is truly a thankless job. I was often left on my own to do a job that requires at least two people. 
There is no room for advancement. I wanted to learn new skills, and offered to help in a different department, but was turned down because the same snotty manager had teenage temper tantrums and screamed "because I don't like her! She is a Freak!" loud enough so I could hear it where I was working. Again, HR did nothing. 
The managers have their little favorites. One person in my department kissed so much beehind that she barely worked at all and got handed promotions, etc. and never once did a dish or cleaned her workstation, when the rest of us had to have our area spotless and fully stocked. She also was invited to private outings with the head manager without anyone else, so they could gossip about us. Managers and other employees talk behind your back all the time. If you have problems with scheduling, other people, etc. they give you the polite version of "suck it up buttercup" and tell you to get back to work. If you are looking for a meaningful full time job where you can showcase your passion and develop lasting relationships with great coworkers, this place  is NOT it! They are also the most expensive Grocery store I have ever been in and as a worker you only get a five percent discount. Woo hoo. 

First of all, the pay is abysmal unless you're a department manager or better. They claim that this is because Festival is more flexible with scheduling than other employers, which is somewhat true, but the bottom line is, flexible scheduling doesn't pay the bills - money does. Festival isn't willing to pay quality employees what they're worth, which leads to a whole host of problems. First of all, there's very little accountability because Festival pays the bare minimum that they can get away with and still manage to keep employees around, so they walk on eggshells when it comes to disciplining under-performing employees. And by "underperforming," I don't mean employees who just come to work and do their jobs - it would honestly be an improvement to have people just come to work and do their jobs. Every department (especially guest services) is lucky just to have all of their scheduled staff for the day, and even if everyone does show up, a lot of them just screw around or chat most of the time and don't even do the bare minimum. Even a lot of department managers are guilty of this.

On the subject of scheduling, it's the one area where Festival uses a lean philosophy, except they take it to an extreme degree to where they schedule the bare minimum number of workers that can maybe get the day's work done, and only if everything goes exactly according to plan, which it never does. This is an aspect of the extreme cost-cutting measures they've taken on since a finance executive significantly over-projected sales for the first quarter and management acted like it was an actual loss that the company experienced. The result is that the few good workers they've been lucky enough to hire end up picking up all of the slack and getting overworked and burned out, and when said workers are absent, their areas of responsibility fall to pieces very quickly. It'd be one thing if these people were actually compensated fairly, but they're not, and the only reason most of them stick around is guilt or not having another option.

Festival puts on a facade of focusing on their culture and values, but said values only seem to apply when they're being used by management as a weapon to make conditions worse for the employees who are actually earning the company its revenue. They claim to put the customer first and that Festival's employees are all a big family, but in practice, both of those things only go as far as they can be accomlished with a dirt cheap budget.

Wages are low and horrible to the point they cannot hire anyone or keep hires more than a year before they find something that pays way more. 

Corporate often times is almost incompetent in decisions, do not communicate anything well or in a timely manner and store standards are subject to personal opinions not any actual policy. 

They have unrealistic standards and expectations for store level employees and expect low wage employees to work like they are making $100,000 a year while the people in the corporate offices making that much are annoyed and often get angry if you challenged anything they say or do or come up with logical reasons to do things differently. 

If you get into a departmental management role note you will be abused. You are salaried at 40 hours a week but will often be expected to work 50+ hours while only being paid for the 40 hours. They will tell you that you can leave early or take days off to make up for going way over on hours but then you will be reprimanded for doing so.  

Most departments run below the bare minimum for hours per week for their given department. For example you may need 380 hours a week to run your department bare bones staffing but are often only given 320-340 hours to schedule staff. So be prepared to try and be 2-3 full time people every day on top of doing what you are supposed to be doing and if associates have extra days off or God forbid full vacations you will be screwed the entire time and no one will care or help. They will just complain about the way things look and tell you to stay and fix it. 

They reduced meat department hours by 80-120 hours a week across the company when they tried to move to prepackaged meat and let go most of the cutters in the company. Now over the past several years they have gone back to cutting and grinding almost everything back in store and have not replaced any of the hours taken away so most stores are trying to do the work of 2-5 meat cutters, grinders, and wrappers with only 1-2 people. 

There are many opportunities to advance your career, however greater emphasis to change your home store location the further up the ladder you climb. You may be essentially expected to relocate your home and family, if you don't want to have a 50+ mile daily commute in some cases. This is ultimately optional, you can stay at the location your at, but I believe they wish to test how committed you are to the company over your own family and needs. This will be sold to you as, "we want you to grow."  

Many if not all positions are underpaid for the amount of stress and sacrifice you undergo. If you truly want to make a career here, you are going to kiss goodbye your weekends and holidays. Few positions have consistent hours, so good luck getting proper sleep.

You will work with many incredible people, and also many fake people with their own self interest solely in mind. Created by the greatest and worst asset of this company, the culture. They try their best to empower the worker and promote growth, but if you fail to meet those high standards the leaders of the company can be very hard and unforgiving. Your store and department must be in pristine condition, even at the busiest times/seasons. These exceptional high standards also need to be achieved with zero overtime. I worked a lot of undocumented overtime in my early 20s just to maintain an acceptable department. 

My time at Festival could have been growing pains. Maybe had I stuck with it I would have been a more effective leader, and therefore less burned out by the system. Since leaving I have never looked back in regret! Don't miss giving up my holidays and weekends with family. My work life balance is much improved. I'm paid more for what I would consider less individual responsibility and pressure.

I do miss some of the great people I meet in my short 5 year career with Festival, but I don't miss Festival Foods the company.        

I've worked for festival for 3 years now.  Festival is a very by the book, rule heavy company.  They work on a point system so if you break a rule you get anywhere between half a point and 5.  When you get to 10 points they fire you.  The idea is to make the store a well oiled machine, but problems arise when the whole human element comes into play.  Our special needs bagger kid 'pointed' out because he was having trouble punching in correctly.  He loved the job.  Our guy with stage 4 organ failure gets points for days hes to faint to stand.  Now they claim you can get the points back in some kind of festi-court, but I don't really believe the whole "we are a family" routine when that kind of thing happens.  The younger kids are made to shave in the bathroom if they even have a hint of a stubble.  The pay is low and they don't care about what your availability is.  The only thing I can figure is all the 4's and 5's on here are from managers.  The job is FANTASTIC if you are a manager.  Coming from a company where the managers work along side you, I had a hard time adjusting to Festival.  The managers are expected to manage the people.  Their hours still eat up the hours in the department, but besides ordering and computer 'work' they don't actually help contribute to the department. On top of that since they handle the points that are given out, the company is rife with hypocrisy.  Manager is late because it was snowy out? No big deal.  You are 4 minutes late because of a mild heart attack? You should have planned it better.  They even have a rule about what color sock you are allowed to wear.  One girl was made to dye her hair a different color because the red she had (a dyed dark red) wasn't a natural hair color. Even with the 5% discount you are better taking the change they throw at you and taking it to their competitor.

I would not recommend working for Festival foods unless its very temporary or you are very desperate.  All they really have going for them is its easy to get hired when people are constantly leaving.

    Festival Foods was my first job. I started off as a cart runner/bagger in High School and worked my way up to the customer service desk. It was great job experience. I learned a lot about customer service and got a lot better at talking to people here. 
    Some days at Festival are especially busy, such as holidays and weekends. On these days you'll have a lot of work to do (especially if you're in customer service). It can get a bit stressful, but I personally enjoyed having a bit of stress. It made the day go by faster and kept me from getting bored. Some days were very slow and it would be all you could do to find something useful to do. You would also get moved around a lot if you worked in the front end. Expect to be put into other departments if there is a surplus of front end associates.
    Management was... management. They were all alright. Loved some of them, others not so much. It was the lower leadership (customer service representatives) that got on my nerves. They sometimes tell you conflicting things, or get in the way. 
    Every now and then they provide free food in the break room or at the brat barn. It was good stuff. I'm a sucker for free food. Other than that, you got a employee discount that they kept changing. It started off at a paltry 5%, but by the time I quit it was temporarily raised to 15%. I have no idea what it is now.
    My favorite part of working at Festival was the people I got to know there. It was a hard working bunch and they actually cared about their jobs to some degree. It also helped that I was in high school and so were about 80% of the other employees. If you don't like teenagers, this might not be the place for you.
    What I didn't like about working there was definitely the CSRs. Most of them were college kids that gossiped a lot and sometimes got in rivalries with each other. Could've done without that. Also the pay was terrible.
    Overall a solid place to work, especially if you are in school and need a flexible job (it was very easy to get time off as a part timer). If you need money, look elsewhere.

A typical day at Festival consisted of 70% stocking product, 10% office work, 10% delegating responsibilities, 10% managing / organizing warehouse conditions.

I learned a lot about retail and grocery in general. I got experience leading a team and delegating responsibility. I also got to order merchandise, manage inventory, organize the sales floor, and manage pricing to optimize profitability.

Management was often hands off which is good because I knew what I was doing and didn't need someone watching over my back. When help was needed it was often hard to get help from management to assist with more labor hours.

Co-workers were always easy to get along with. Festival culture is great and we generally hired people who were friendly and had a decent work ethic.

The hardest part of the job were the hours. You never have the same schedule from week to week. The shifts are never consistent and you need to work mornings, evenings and weekends in order to match business needs. Also holidays were often worked because these are often the busiest days of the year.

The most enjoyable part of the job was working with good people which helped the day move along more smoothly. Also you are always busy stocking product/ helping customers which helped the day move quickly

If you are looking for more of a management role this is not for you. You are required to do a lot of manual labor because the hours delegated to individual departments is not enough to allow the assistant department manager to actually spend the majority of his time managing. It is however a good place to start if you like a physically demanding job and don't mind getting your hands dirty.

For myself this was absolutely the perfect job and the perfect department with the most amazing Manager and Assistant Manager I have ever had.

The over all culture of Management is very professional and a bit ridged. A lot like the political government structure and culture of the United States, but you do meet the owner and founder at least once a year as well as all others that sit in positions of power. They know most associates, even the newest associates, by face and name. Not just the "Hey Amy, how are you today?", one would normally get with wearing any form of identification but actual details of personal lives.

Coworkers are at least as personal if not more so than management. The odds of having any discrepancy with coworkers is very hard to believe and very hard to achieve. Most everyone is cheery, genuinely happy, helpful, and flat out nice despite the situations life throws at them.

Hardest part is the heavy lifting for most when it comes to the meat department, other wise bending and repetitive motions tend to be hard on the body.

Best part...personally I believe the job itself was the best and most enjoyable part of the day, no matter how long or hard it ended up being. Other wise narrowing it down...my Manager and the customers were always helpful, polite, and caring in turn to associates and it just made life seem so much easier in general.

Requesting time off is the only actual difficulty everyone faces, with the close connections between customers and coworkers makes it hard to request time off. Also hard to get time off knowing who has plans when and the conflicts going on with giving everyone time off around holidays.

As an assistant I got paid below what starting positions get paid at other retail/grocery stores. Pay overall is terrible unless you're a department manager, but then you lose any semblance of work life balance as every manager I worked with was constantly putting in plenty of uncompensated hours because they were salaried and if they didn't their department would fall apart. As an assistant I was expected to know how to run the entire department and to step in whenever my manager was gone, switch to night shift fairly regularly to cover if anyone was gone, as well as being extremely flexible with my schedule which regularly affected my quality of sleep when I would get less then 10 hours between shifts. And yet despite going out of my way to go above and beyond my pay never reflected that and I was making less than other assistants in smaller departments with far less responsibility. Company didn't care whatsoever about the pandemic or doing anything to try and keep their workers healthy and shortly after leaving 5 months into the pandemic a lot of my old coworkers started getting sick. Not to mention when I first started there one of my managers would regularly go over the line and hit me and other coworkers with cardboard as hard as he could as a "joke" among doing other extremely inappropriate things and when I told this to HR and provided them with a list of people who also had bad experiences with this manager as well as a time and place when he would hit us in front of a camera and they didn't look into it at all or do anything about it except talk to him and that manager still works there and still does the same stuff. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Stocking associate 12 salaries reported	$24.75 per hour
Cashier 3 salaries reported	$13.00 per hour
Retail sales associate 10 salaries reported	$22.50 per hour
Produce associate 10 salaries reported	$1,050 per week
Order picker 10 salaries reported	$1,250 per week

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