retail sales associate

shift leader

sales associate

retail assistant manager

assistant store manager

Pet Food Express

Not sure what happened to PFE, but at some point they decided that profits were more important than repeat business and making customers happy. As many other reviews have said, you are given at least a dozen products to try and upsell (despite the fact that apparently EVERYTHING we sell is top quality). Treat of the Month went from being a high quality product that you would discuss the benefits for a pet to the owner, to "it's on sale, you should buy it to try!" and then repeat again every month, ad nauseum. Many managers will take it personally if you do not sell X amount per day. Luckily our store didn't write you up for it, but I have heard that has happened. Hours can go from working full time during inventory while shortstaffed, to working one or two shifts a week because they're training new people, or they just dislike you. Hours will get cut if management doesn't feel like you are "passionate enough" about working, which is code for "if you sell more Kiwi Air Dried, you might earn back those extra shifts". Management is NOT your friend, despite their bubbly demeanor...until it hits the fan.

Except for on weekends, be prepared to work with one other employee, and 2-4 managers per shift. Don't expect extra help on truck days, and also expect one or more of the managers to hide in the office for 70% of their shift, pretending to do paperwork, training, and phone calls. Rules on returns/exchanges are a joke. You will be questioned why you did X thing regardless of the context. Dog food bag too full? You should have told the customer to try it for longer! Too low? Well obviously their dog likes it, they should have returned it sooner. You cannot win with the managers and they definitely have their favorites. Incentives/rewards for selling promo items is also funny: if you win at bingo, crossword puzzle, candyland, whatever, you *might* win an AIR FRESHENER for your car, or a Rhubix Cube. I am not kidding. For selling hundreds of dollars of merchandise for this company, they'll splurge a whopping $2.50 on you. Yelp reviews will only hurt you. If it's a bad review, you get written up and possibly suspended for a few days. If it's a 5 star reviews, and the customer personally names you for helping them? Nada. Oh sometimes they'll buy lunch which is usually cheap pizza with no toppings. And you better hope you're working that Saturday or you miss out.

The positives of the job do stand out, however. The discount is AMAZING. High quality, top-end dog and cat foods but for a price you would pay for junk at Wally World. You learn a lot about animal health and nutrition, skills I have definitely used in everyday life with my own animals, and discussing with friends and family. With our main competition being PetCo/PetSmart, you will get those people who come in, demand the world from you, or turn their nose up at you not having Science Diet, but the people who stick around are a dream come true. You will be happy to see them come in, you won't feel like you're working, you just get to chat with an old friend and shoot the breeze about your pets. Customers will bring in their animals, as well as employees. While the job is essentially glorified retail, it is super fun to talk with a customer while playing with their big fluffball who wants nothing but cuddles!

In closing, I feel like the cons outweigh the pros, especially if this is your only source of income and you lack the hours. If you are highly motivated to sell, you may as well work at a car dealership where you can actually make a career out of it. If you are really passionate about animals and want to help people, you might just consider PetCo or PetSmart for a less stressful environment, or even better, get into pet sitting, vet work, volunteering at a shelter, etc. Pet Food Express is getting an inflated head from bigger business, without realizing it's the employees making that possible.

Most of the reviews for PFE are reviewing the stores or corporate office, so for future PFE Warehouse employees I will give a somewhat quick and very honest unbiased review of the warehouse. I've worked in other warehouses and am in no way angry with PFE.
My overall rating is 2 stars: This is a very small warehouse, small staff. The pay starts at $12.50 which is low and unfulfilling. The schedule differs for everyone but typically new hires are taken more advantage of being they get 1 day off every couple days. During the week noon-8:30 & Sunday 7am-330pm. This schedule is awkward and isn't exactly helpful to a normal persons body clock, you never really feel rested. That being said your schedule could change on a moments notice being switched to 8am-630pm or possibly later. There is little communication between managers and supervisors when you first start the job, very little instruction about how to go about doing your job and even less instruction about the rules in the warehouse. I've been working here for about a year now and still haven't been given an employee handbook, I don't know where to find HR, etc. Employee morale is generally low/upset with the management for the lack of communication or carelessness of day to day work. Yes the owners are very nice, even stopping the entire warehouse/corporate office to serve cake to everyone while making a spectacle to celebrate persons who have birthdays or anniversaries with the company. In theory, this sounds fun but to stop the workflow of a cohesive warehouse for 30 min to an hour just creates overtime/more work. There is an incredibly high turn-over rate in the warehouse for all of these reasons and during your initial interview, you may be told that you will start as part time but just wait a week or two and you will be full time. The equipment they use is Toyota, which isn't very intuitive to say the least. The breakrooms are small/boring, no tvs, just sitting there in silence crowded around fellow employees hearing them eat their food. For all of these reasons, I have to give the PFE warehouse 2 stars at the most. I'm sure there are far worse out there but that being said, there are certainly better. Hopefully they can come to understand that a strong warehouse environment will make it much easier on the growth of the company in the future. My only positives would be the PFE employee discount (roughly %50), free Keurig coffee in the break room, and occasionally left over food/scraps that the corporate office orders and doesn't want. So if this sounds like an upgrade from your previous job, then welcome to the PFE family!

I learned so much more about pet nutrition, training, etc. than I could've possibly imagined working here. My managers clearly knew their stuff; all of them were overwhelmingly patient with my development in learning about our products as well as generally how to be a sales clerk, and they are all extremely passionate about their and our customers' pets. I really felt like I learned a ton because of my coworkers' knowledge and passion for their work (vs. new hire training), and it made asking [an excessive number of] questions feel less like a burden and more like an opportunity to learn from the pros. Customers bring in their pets all of the time, which is a huge perk for people without pets (especially right now). Company-wide sales are an easy way to get $10+ gift cards if you know what you're doing and it's a nice way to feel like you're boosting the store's clout somewhat lol. Breaks/lunch feel completely reasonable and managers are flexible with your schedule if there's a conflict. Employee discount is nuts. Also pretty dope that your store gets a free lunch if a customer leaves a positive review and mentions someone in the store by name.

I do have gripes about the job, but they're minor in the grand scheme of things / more of an issue with a sales position than with the company. First, it can definitely feel monotonous sometimes when the store shoves a certain product of the month/week down your throat - I shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing conversation at the register to extend a sale and screw over my coworkers because the line has now been held up or I have to step off the register to show the customer what I'm talking about. Secondly, the sales goals feel completely arbitrary and don't give me any indication of how I am doing on a daily basis - if the store hits the daily sales goal, that's awesome, but how'd I actually do? I found myself trying to go above and beyond early on and frustrated that there was no concrete way to keep track of my progress over time other than making a mental note of what I sold, which is impossible when (a) you're not supposed to have your phone out in front of customers and (b) sometimes that's just not feasible when there's a line out the door. Lastly, even though I got prizes for some of these, the weekend sales competitions reward you for ringing things up that nobody in the store put any effort into selling. It's completely counterproductive because it incentivizes you to just plop yourself behind the register and rack up points instead of putting in effort to sell the product.

All in all, great place to work for, and I'm very happy I did.

When we sold out to a corporation, things started changing rapidly. They started hiring outside of the company for lots of the corporate positions, and a lot of the management positions in stores. So now you get to train your manager on how to do the basic tasks in the store. The company had previously focused on a very high standard of knowledge base and work ethic, which quickly disappeared. After they sold out they pretty much took everything that was good about working for the company and started getting rid of it. Our Christmas bonus this year was a lunch box. A lot of the really good employees that worked there when I began have left the company due to the foolishness, or are spread across a bunch of different stories. It seems like the company does nothing to make sure that stores are adequately staffed, and the people that are left are constantly expected to pick up the slack. And then you get unfavorable reviews because you aren't doing all of the things they want you to do meanwhile you're drowning in way too much work for a single person to get done. You just get voluntold than new things are your responsibility. Management will harass you  to follow people that don't want assistance, going so far as to look through the receipts and claim on certain transactions that you could have done more. The idea is that you should be able to turn every transaction into a $50 plus transaction. If the numbers aren't good we're told it's because we literally aren't doing our jobs.  New hires coming in get more and more diluted training every round, with management looking around and wondering why things that used to get done autonomously don't get done anymore. When they do hire people, they demand way too much from them and don't train them adequately, and then berate them when they do things wrong. The level of commitment they want for a company that pays just above minimum wage to most of its employees makes no sense. Even with the minimum wage going up in the state there are no talks of any cost of living raises or anything like that. So now you end up overworked, and undervalued at a company that still wants you to maintain those high standards but doesn't care to pay you to do so. The only real benefit to working at this company anymore is the employee discount. Don't bother applying unless you want to be exploited.

I absolutely love working at Pet Food Express and I wouldn't choose any other retail store if I had to work at another retail, but hopefully, this will be my last retail store. I love the abundant knowledge in pet food, product knowledge, and pet nutrition. Doing the required PT sheets are helpful but I wish it was more interactive because I can't retain all that info, so I'm glad they condensed it but I feel like the new worksheet is lacking some information. I hate doing the role-play because again its a required we do at least 1 weekly... The worst one of all is the useless Cloud sheets that don't even do anything for us at all, it's a nuisance because we have to do one every day including the busy weekends where we barely get time to do it.  

Yea, yea they increase our wage and thinks that's really enough, but it's not because of the extra responsibility they put on us. Stupid Cloud sheets. Please get rid of that. One minor mistake, all goes to down. We get an earful from the upper management. Honestly, that's why managers/employees leave. It's a retail store, yet they treat us like we're slaves and get punished every time a mistake happens. Treats us like a human, we stay. Humans are supposed to fail and learn from mistakes. Let us fail and learn, but don't be like vultures and scold us. It just drives us out. Stop putting so much pressure and making us sell those promos like crazy. Listen to your customers because our customers don't like it when you push products on them or walk up to them several times after they already told you they've been helped! They get angry. I feel like you ought to do more customer research and interaction to see what they like rather what you guys think it's right. I hate it when its the PFE or the highway... Upper managers are cray cray.... 

You guys ought to hire more people because we working like sweaty dogs here and when people call out we get swamp and don't have enough coverage. Raise them to pay, we stay.

You definitely learn a lot at this company, even at a store level, but favoritism runs deep. In the years I was here, I only had 1 manager who truly cared for my advancement and growth, both personally and professionally, and offered support wherever they could. Other managers would say they were on your side but would ultimately gossip with higher-up managers that would result in them bombarding you with personal questions and questioning your character and work ethic. Very rarely get your breaks on time or at all. Sometimes there would be days where I wouldn't be able to take my 10 minute breaks due to understaffing, but still was told I had to mark on the timeclock that I did in order "for the company to not get fined, we'll make it up to you later". The company as a whole was good, the pay was decent, and the work environment wasn't bad, but there was always drama going on. In the years I was here, there were 4 other managers that were fired for SA/harassment, two of which covered for each other. The hardest part of the job is once they know you'll willingly do more than the bare minimum, they take advantage and use it to make you do more in promises of being promoted, but it rarely happens. Christmas bonuses are cheap, considering all the work that is done at the store level, while higher ups get much better rewards. You must talk to customers "as if they were friends" and they will drill that into you, or you'll ultimately be made to feel like an outcast by higher up managers and eventually let go or you'll want to quit. However, the best part about this company is that they do sell good quality products and they prioritize training in which you learn things about pet nutrition you would have never event thought of. Employee discount is amazing (up to 70% off certain products), and they also offer health benefits to part time and full time employees, 401k matching and profit sharing, accumulative PTO/sick time. 

This is based for Socal region and management. If you’re not looking to make this place your career, then it’s a great way to not only help pet parents learn about good and bad kinds of pet food, but also help your fur babies as well, as this place does give extensive information about all the products. I learned a lot here about pet food, that will stay with me forever even after I have left. Overall region has little to know ability to be able to move up within the company. They would much rather hire outsiders, instead of promoting within. Upper management is very clicky as well, so if they don’t like you, no matter how much effort you put it, you will always be just under availability for promotions. I was with a team of managers who all always fell short of promotions because of items that didn’t always adhere to what went on in the region. For example, Nor Cal has multiple stores in multiple cites, SoCal only has a few MILES between each other, and if you want to move up, you HAVE to be willing to work at other locations or they hold it against you. And if you haven’t, or haven’t been given the opportunity yet, the moment your review comes up, it will keep you from Eligibility for promotion, because you did not score all 4’s. 

I enjoyed what I did, I enjoyed the ability to help others through knowledge, and playing with pets daily was amazing. I like what the wonders have created. However the SoCal region needs better management, and a better ability to create options for upward Advancement. Your review systems forces employees to do the job of a hire up manager, when you’re not even being paid to be one yet. It’s that “do they job you want to move up to now, without being paid it. And if you don’t do it all right all the time, you won’t move up. But keep doing that job without compensation anyway.” PFE needs to fix how they advance their employees. Bottom line.

Pet Food Express is a 64-store and growing company on a mission to keep pets happy, healthy, and homed. Family-owned by founders Michael and Mark, Pet Food Express is a place where everyone knows your pet's name - and your name too! 

Every day our teams come together to engage with our clients to enrich the lives of pets and our communities. Pet Food Express is known as a career-oriented retailer, where our team members count on ongoing professional career mentorship, the benefit of a skills-based development program, and frequent in-person conversations with your regional managers. We're a resilient and fast-growing company, with ample opportunity for advancement. Perseverance, commitment, and reliability are traits which will help in your career pursuits.

Not everyone is looking to make a career at Pet Food Express. And if that's you, Pet Food Express is also a great place to meet good people, develop professionally, and find purposeful work while you're with us. 

We're a feedback organization, so that will feel empowering and natural if you are coachable and willing to accept feedback in the pursuit of personal and professional development.

We sell the world's best pet products, and we know the only way for those products to enrich the lives of pets is for the product to go home with our clients. We're relationship-oriented, trustworthy sales professionals. You'll do really well here if you love pets, you love people, and you know how to start and sustain a conversation with just about anyone.

Join us on our mission to enrich the lives of pets and people.


Although I learned a lot about pet nutrition that I'm ever grateful for, this job created way too much stress.
- It's literally psychologically torturous working here.
- Corporate has ridiculous standards and they put a lot of pressure on you to be a certain way.
- Management is unorganized and unprofessional.
- We have to care about sales "goals" and pretend at the same time that we care about customers and their pets. Literally salesmen are the scum of the earth. Lying while pretending we care. The sales-ey approach is so obvious to customers.
- No commission for being a salesman. You are forbidden from accepting tips. 
- You will have genuine conversations with customers and later be told you were wasting company time. They want you to care about money and only money, talking to many customers and searching the store for more money-opportunity customers. It's toxic.
- You're literally never good enough for them. No matter how knowledgeable you are or how much you genuinely love helping people, you won't be good enough.
- They don't care about pets at all. It's sales, sales, sales and that's it.
- If you're smart, others around you say you're cocky and gossip about it
- You need a month-long vacation for every two months you work here.
- At some point you'll be so stressed that you'll be on the verge of crying.

You'd have to pay me $18 an hour to deal with this cr*p. I only lasted a few months. I have never had higher stress in my entire life. Don't do it. Don't work here. Trust me. 

In my time at pet food express in early 2020.... it’s strange. They make sure to feign adherence to the legal and moral standards imposed by law, but there is seriously toxic tension and exclusion depending on even my race or assumed political views because of my race. I believe politics has no acceptable role in the workplace but it can be depended on that conversation will become political during any downtime. Nearly every casual conversation was heavy and extreme politically. It becomes toxic when someone is discovered to have different views. And rapidly it is spread among the staff to make sure every employee knows about your views on, say... abortion. I was surprised since this is California but nevertheless I guess mostly Christians were hired by chance. Or maybe by design, idk. 
Also, in order to advance within the company, there are three 6-month periods of evaluation, from associate to consultant to.. it’s all BS. Until, in my case, after 18 months, when advancing to any kind of leadership position is deemed possible, they constantly just hire any outsider with some management experience elsewhere, and they go straight to the front of the line. They do not promote from within. You’ll go 18 months like me, slowly climbing, only to be displaced because they found a 21 year old who has some sort of vaguely relevant associates degree and no actual experience within the industry. 

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