retail sales associate

administrative assistant

merchandiser

management trainee

assistant manager

Plaid Pantry

Different stores vary wildly depending on neighborhood and management. A bad area or a bad boss can easily make the job 10x more stressful. I was lucky to get a good area with a good manager and area manager. At my location there are lots of regular customers who are nice to chat with which helps offset the weirder ones. 
The company itself likes to think its hip and with it but its mostly talk. Raises are very small, (I got twenty-five cents for my promotion) and they have sworn by having only one person in the store at a time, which means if its busy you aren't getting anything done and you might not get to go to the bathroom either. Even if the manager is trying to look out for you the higher management won't let them give out good wages, even though the whole company is desperately short staffed.
Customers come and go quickly so you tend to say the same couple lines over and over. Night shift tends to be way quieter but you have a long list of tasks to keep on top of while the door is open and you are alone. 
This isn't a breadwinner's job but if you need an entry level position where you will get lots of usable customer service experience, its a good start. Make sure the store you apply to seems.... well-run. Perhaps chat with the cashier when they aren't busy to get a feel for the location's morale. If you get lucky and keep on top of your job you get plenty of time to goof off.
Just kind of a meh job overall but I've heard many worse experiences. Gladly coworkers and managers tend to be nice more often than not and the suckiness of how the company is run and the generally annoying clientele and work helps to build base-level comradery. Could be worse could be better.

Typical day on the job: go to the office. Respond to emails. Check daily cash at stores and follow up if managers are completing counts. Plan your route for your store visits and drop off any of the things you received from office courier. While you’re going around to each store complete store checklist so they’re clean, stocked, & ready for business. Pick up paperwork that needs to be turned into office and drop it back in your courier bag. 

I learned hard work can lead to advancement. 

Management is a mixed bag. I have had great supervisors and not so great, I think this is the case in any career. 

Workplace culture is a mixed bag. Managers can be territorial and don’t work well with marketing/office personnel. Overall I had good relationships with my employees and supervisors. 

Hardest part of the job was working all day and having a graveyard call out with no notice. Really sucks when you’re about to go to bed and you have to work a night shift and then have to do your manager duties the next day. 

Most enjoyable part was the people I worked with and the customers. Meet people from all walks of life and had good interactions on a daily basis. 

Overworked, underpaid, promised advancement without delivering (or horribly undercutting "market pay rates"), terrible corporate/upper management culture. 

Literally everything wrong with retail in a nutshell all in a horrible environment meant to use you to the point of exhaustion. 

Skeleton crews at all stores now that they no longer can hire "on call" people, and management flips between stores all the time due to turnovers (I had 3 managers in the 2 years I was at the same store, before I quit soon after turning down the promotion myself).

Going assistant manager means you get all the deadlines and expectations of a full on manager, without the pay or benefits. If the office messes up paperwork and your store doesn't meet quotas, you're out your bonus. Several managers will pawn off the majority of the workload on assistants and floor personnel, acting like the paperwork takes all day.

There's nothing good I can say about the company other than the few fellow employees and regulars that made the job tolerable before mentally and physically breaking you. 

If you don't believe any of this, ask any manager about their particular stores turnover rate, and the longest employed they have.

i enjoy working for plaid, but they don't care at all for the mental and physical health of their employees. unless you set clear, hard boundaries, they'll overwork and underpay you, while making you question your sanity along the way. 
 they constantly oscillate between treating their employees as replaceable, and treating them like they're absolutely vital and if they can't come to work they're doing a world-ending disservice to their coworkers and management. when i first started, i was told that it doesn't matter if i'm throwing my guts up, or bleeding internally, or have explosive diarrhea, i had to commit to coming in regardless. taking sick days is a brutal offense to them. they set you loose on a store to run alone with minimal training, often asking you to cover 3-5 shifts per week at several different stores, with hours that ensure absolutely none of their workers get enough rest or time away to even think about looking for work elsewhere. 
if you're considering a job here, by all means go for it! but make sure you're extremely, intensely, repeatedly clear about what hours you can and cannot work, and don't let them test your boundaries. 

A typical day at work started with counting out you co-worker, which means that after they count you count to ensure a proper count. Then it was 8 hours of customer service, up-selling, stocking, inventory, and maintenance/cleaning.

In the year that I worked for this company I learned how to identify counterfeit money, thieves, fake id's, and age by hand. Then there's the more obvious aspects of the job, like schematics and sales.

The manager was a pretty nice guy. He was good at his job and well liked by the community.

Co-workers, though I did not work side by side with them, were nice people as well. They were pretty dependable and would usually show up on time. Actually, altogether, at that location there was a pretty good team.

The hardest part of the job was dealing with irate customers who would curse you out for asking for I.D. on a beer sale. That an the thieves. The store was robbed and a clerk was assaulted while I worked there. Luckily, or perhaps due to my own skills, I was not.

The most enjoyable part of the job was the customers. Good people in that neighborhood.

The job can very much vary from store location to store location. However due to its unpredictability and the refusal to supply the store with an efficient manpower to handle the store, less can actually get done due to the change in customer activity and the job is at times incredibly dangerous. 

The policies are less than accommodating to the workers themselves. There's also very poor training involved depending, again, on the manager or store location. If you know what you're doing and have had previous experience in retail it can be super easy to manage, and some days can be ridiculously slow, allowing for a lot to get done. The independence provided is somewhat nice, as you're giving the tools to manage yourself and do tasks in whatever order you wish, and the hours can be flexible with a lot of overtime opportunities.

Working for Plaid Pantry was a good opportunity for benefits, but my overall experience was highly stressful. It gave me experience in multi-tasking and handling large amounts of customers on my own. Management wasn't terrible, but there is always room for improvement especially when it comes down to paying employees what they deserve. My coworkers were very open and honest when it came to how they felt about the job. Their opinion didn't differ much from what I experienced. It's a high-energy store and requires quick thinking, confidence, and ability to handle stressful situations. The one thing I enjoyed about the job was the customers. Most of them were very kind, generous, and understanding especially when it became hectic. The downside, extremely stressful and put a damper on my mental health which is why I decided to leave the company.

A typical work day at Plaid Pantry I work alone on a 9 hr. shift. I help customers, stock shelves, mop, sweep, pull expired stock and balance my register. I have learned more effective customer service skills and also I have learned how to approach situations on my own in different ways. I do not need much instruction and am able to figure out and perform tasks on my own. Every shift I work alone for the most part but it's always nice to have co-workers you get along with. The hardest part of the job is remembering all the regular customers names and the products they buy most, because I want them to feel like I know and remember them to make them more comfortable when they come in the store. The most enjoyable part of the job is being on my own and being able to have my own routine to do my work.

Your experience will heavily depend on your store. If you are well staffed and get along with your managers and coworkers, it can be perfectly fine. Insofar as customer service goes, I have had a better experience here than other places but people can still be very rude. Harassment and robberies are an occasional concern. You mostly work alone, which can be stressful when it's busy.

The biggest issue for me is relations with corporate. Communication is often ineffective and the higher up bosses don't really care about store employees, just your sales and inventory numbers, and want to pay you as little as possible.

If you like chatting with folks, the best part is easily the regular customers who are friendly and polite. Getting to know the people who are around your work and stop in for their daily needs gives a great sense of community.

Convenience store cashier not the greatest job to have if you don't like people fast paced never get a break customers have no respect for your time they think you should be behind that counter at all times and that you have nothing else better to do but be behind that counter customers are constantly in and out like I said no time for breaks if you get a break it's because it's shift change in the other person's there just change shifts with you you work independently and you work with a wide variety of people and you have side job duties you need to get done on the side that is impossible to do

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Retail sales associate 4 salaries reported	$15.99 per hour
Administrative assistant 5 salaries reported	$22.40 per hour
Merchandiser 1 salary reported	$19.25 per hour
Management trainee 2 salaries reported	$22.00 per hour
Assistant manager 3 salaries reported	$16.07 per hour

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