store manager

shift manager

store team leader

food & beverage team leader

stocking associate

Ruler Foods

I began in the Management Training Program with a degree in Management and some management experience. I was placed into a store (out of 5) in our area and my first day consisted of orientation and then instantly presented my very own box cutter. I was then asked to go to the floor and work on a pallet of refrigerated goods that was sitting out on the floor. Oh you finished that pallet?, move on to the two others in the cooler. 

Welcome to your new Management Role.

The average Ruler Food store is small but you will circle around it at least a hundred to two hundred times a day if you are slow. Your average day when trained consists of: opening up the store (counting tills, preparing deposit, counting safe), checking orders/ writing orders, and then running those orders while keeping a store afloat. My average day as an Assistant Manager started at 6:45 and if I was lucky got out at 6PM. When closing, I would come in at 11:45 and leave around 10:30-11PM at night. There was plenty of opportunities to stay later and it was expected. You are salary and you know it. Average work week- 65 hours at least. If you do not put in this time, your store will not be up to par with Bowen's standards. The district manager at the time even mentioned how we seemed to be living at our store... She wasn't concerned about our well being either.

You will become a beast with your box cutter as your entire job consists of making sure the shelves are stocked by adequate orders as well as running trucks. Each order you prepare will be heavily dependant on how fast thinking you are to what is needed and what will last you. You will have meat, grocery, dairy, refrigerated, bread, produce, and frozen. And each one of these jobs will equate to a new truck, every day (except for Sunday. I can't speak for trucks today.)  Your staffing is so light that you will need to downstack each pallet and get it cut open and then placed on a U-Boat (Green cart) that your workers will need to run out to the floor. To get the job done you will need to help run the truck as quickly as possible while assisting customers and helping run registers. If you don't help, expect trucks to get backed up.

Staffing was the hardest part of the position. Upper Management at Jay-C; located in Seymour is so focused on getting more stores open to help cover overheard, that they place an insane Sales Per Labor quota on your store to meet costs. What I was told many times was, "Labor is NOT negotiable." How true this was.

Your store makes this much money/divided by the hours worked- it better be above this said number. If your store is slow one day, you better send someone home.
If your store is busy, you won't want to call in anyone else because you don't want to risk ruining your SPL Hour. There was many days I would cover the entire store mainly by myself because I was terrified of risking my SPL Hour.

As an Assistant Manager, much is also dependent on your Store Manager. If you do not mesh well with your direct superior, expect a wild ride that will run you into the ground. Trust me, Ruler is already good at that. I experienced three different store managers in my tenure at Ruler and each had their own way of doing things and you consistently had to question if their way was the proper way. 

Speaking of Area Managers, your area manager should be your direct resource. You will have their number and you will know them well. Upper management is so driven to prove themselves they will throw anyone under the bus to prove a point. Do not doubt their ability to make you question your self worth. The HR Director, President, and Director of Operations will do the same. The job security was low. Turnover was high. They would consistently hire more trainees for this program to replace the ones that were leaving. On trips up north to help stores prep for visits, the same thing was occurring in IL, KY, IN, AND OH. The Area Managers will try and sugar coat it but you will feel it immediately.

The work is labor intensive. You will hurt. You will come home achey and pass out. It has been a year and a half since I last ran a truck at Ruler and I still don't feel right physically and I am young.

My honest advice is to avoid this company (Jay-C/Ruler) at all costs if you have a life... want a family... and want time. I do not regret time with Ruler as it got me to my position I am to today. 

But I will never go back.

Compensation wasn't horrible, as long as I worked my scheduled shift, which was as likely as the Wicked Witch surviving the ice bucket challenge.

The great saying goes that people don't leave companies, they leave bosses. And that could not be more accurate in this company. Upper management does not seem to remember what it is like being at store level, and there was a big issue of too many chiefs. Everyone wanted something different and no one was ever on the same page. Micromanagement was very much a part of your daily routine, or lack there of. I thought I had a daily routine, until it was time
For my weekly inspection of the store. Then all bets were off. It wasn't my shift anymore; it was my area manager's.

The turnover was horrible. I saw multiple clerks come and go who worked for me, and I saw multiple members of the management team come and go within a matter of my last 6 months of my career. Training was not up to par, and it seemed as though everyone was set up to fail. I saw the stress level of everyone who wanted more than anything to be home with their families, but couldn't because they had a job to do. Upper management does not care about the well being of the store management team. They only care about the stores. I have seen too many great managers leave because they were never appreciated by upper management (I was one of them). And they continue to drop like flies, from newly hired management trainees to store managers who at one point loved their careers. And the ones who are still sticking it out want nothing more than to leave.

I made a lot of friends, and always enjoyed the different walks of life that I came across. But that wasn't worth the stress and the headache which led to heartache.

If you value your health, your family, and your life as you know it, don't work there.

I work hard managing the front end that includes customer, answering phones and running the front by myself. Today sucked because I not only worked self checkout,answered phones,helped customers and other coworkers but was also given the tasks of putting a pallet of drinks up while managing self checkout. I worked very hard but had a manager who was rude to me as I was doing my job. I still work here after almost six years of no promotion and make less than most jobs in retail. I stick with it because I have to support my family but it has become less and less rewarding each day I stay with rulers. I hope they can make some better changes soon. Self checkout is a nightmare with the machines malfunctioning every day and customer not liking how slow or sensitive they are. Also customer who steal cart fulls of items and destroying the restrooms with just nasty grossness is a restrooms be. Day shift front in comes in to clean the gross nasty restrooms every day. The hardest part of my job is trying to cry because it's overwhelming how much I alone have to do and don't bother asking for management because some get mad and don't wish to be bothered if you need help or need a override or have a customer who has a problem that you are unable to help them with. I still work hard and will continue and hopefully one day my concerns will be answered and maybe one day someone will see just how hard I work each day.

There is never a day that goes by at ruler that you are ever appreciated. The more you do the more you are expected to do. A bigger turn around and never enough employees to do the job. The safety of the job is bad when it comes to good work techniques. Many employees have injured they're backs and then you are not useful to them any more. They make you feel bad when you ask for you're breaks. The cashiers are overworked and sometimes you have no help. This is bad the first  of the month. They never schedule enough workers and managers are scolded by big managers if they schedule too many employees. Sometimes only one cashier and one person to condition store at night. If someone calls in they won't schedule another employee. We have too many shift managers, one manager and 1 asst. manager. I know of 2 that actually does they're job. Everyone wants to be a boss! Sometimes it's embarrassing to say I work there. Low hours and bad attitudes most of the time but a few very nice people to work with. No one stays long.  I've been there almost a year and I really don't know how much longer I'll be there. I've seen 3 managers since I've been working there.

During my time with Ruler Foods I was constantly on my toes afraid I would lose my job at any moment. With Ruler being the new style of grocery stores for Kroger, you'd expect upper management to have worked in the stores themselves but that is not the case. For busier stores a work day starts at 6 AM and ends after the store closes. They pay you for 45 hrs of work but if you work less then 60 your store will look horrible. A typical work week is 65-80 hours. Myself and other managers have worked even more than that with a couple shifts being 24 hrs plus, straight. If you have a social life or marriage don't expect to keep them if your wanting to succeed at your job. They are constantly worried about payroll and only let you schedule the bare minimum of people, which is almost always not enough coverage for the store. Then get upset when you can't get things done with not enough people. There are many flaws with the company but the higher ups don't want to hear anything about it.

Part-time is what I’m into now.  Can’t handle the 40-hour work week as I have health issues.  But I do try to work hard, but given I’m older, I’m not the fastest worker out there.  Nevertheless, I have noticed over the past three years working here that a lot of the employees are just trying to get by on minimal performances at best.  They seem to think Ruler Foods is some kind of adult daycare center where they can hide for a few hours from husbands/wives or boyfriends/girlfriends and basically do almost nothing.  If this is what you are into, then this is the place for you, but I wish somebody who actually cares about their job performance would apply here.  It would make things move much more smoothly, responsibility-wise.  Also, I wouldn’t have to be wasting so much of my time fixing other people’s mistakes.  Hey, could be totally illiterate and work here!  I know, I’m constantly having to fix the problems of illiterately misplaced product every single day!

When I first started everything was great, flexible hours, friendly crew, all great then over the course of the last couple of weeks to a month it’s started going downhill. All sorts of “rules that have always been there” started applying like no ear buds, however in our training provided by Kroger the videos show employees doing their jobs with ear buds in and not only that but the training goes out of its way to tell you when not to wear earbuds. Also all of the sudden timing has gotten so tight to other than the regular days you have off a week if you need even a single more day is an incredible hassle. As a college student stuff will suddenly pop out of nowhere that I need to attend and I cant always just “swap shifts” with someone when we only have 3ish people to swap with but they also work so it’s impossible. As much as I thought this would be a job I stuck with for the majority of my time in college I’m getting pretty close to putting in my two weeks.

Typical day at work for me, is coming in and punching it then i head to the sheet that is in the front by the manager office to see if i will be working cashier. If i am not working cashier, i go to the back and get a cart and load that cart with boxes of stuff that needs to be put on the shelf's. Working in a enviorment like this i have learned that you will always be busy at work, also with working in the cashier you are being timed, being timed and knowing your being timed puts you under a lot of pressure. The people i worked with, they where really nice. They helped me if i did not understand something, or if i was stuck at the cashier. I had the most help stocking shelf's. The hardest part of my job was being timed on everything. The most enjoyable part about my time was working with others, and talking with people. Even though we were suppose to be working we still were getting to know each other.

A typical day at work would be running the frozen turck. While you are running truck you cut open boxes and sometimes you empty the boxes on the shelves and sometimes you just put the box on the shelve. You normally have about an hour to four to run truck depending on how big the truck is. Say if the truck is 1,000 you have and an hour to run it, but if it 16,000 you'd have more. While working there I loved being able to stock the shelves and interact with the customers. The one thing I really just did not like about the job was stacking Bananas. The bananas come in a pallet of 8 or 10 and they were forty pound boxes that would rip easy. Whenever the box would rip it would bruise all the bananas and we would have to mark them down. Every time a box got dropped we lost money.

The hours in the store are very, very tight. Several evenings there is only a manager and one, sometimes two other people, to cashier, stock, condition, clean the store etc. On top of that, we were told that we should leave early if at all possible. Not much chance for advancement, unless you want to go into management. From what I've seen, management are expected to work an average of 55-60 hours or more, but on paper, they are based on 45 hours. I'm not sure what their pay scale is, but with the extra hours, it may not be worth it. I learned that the hours seem to be plentiful when a new store first opens, but decrease dramatically after a short period of time. Most employees were told when hired,an average work week of 25 hours  and the average is actually about 15 hours per week.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Store manager 14 salaries reported	$69,158 per year
Shift manager 25 salaries reported	$19.32 per hour
Store team leader 13 salaries reported	$20.79 per hour
Food & beverage team leader 7 salaries reported	$22.56 per hour
Stocking associate 10 salaries reported	$29.50 per hour

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