order picker

deli associate

forklift operator

truck driver

cashier

Spartannash

I entered into contractual work with Nash Finch Company in 2002.  At the time the company was undergoing a change of leadership as well as a Securities & Exchange investigation of vendor practices.  Ron Marshall was CEO, the executor of company-wide initiatives. Employees had little to no interaction with the executive leadership, as is typical with corporations in America today, and when granted an opportunity, were given little material with which to build an intelligible conversation that held relevance to company projects. For the last 16 years I have spent the majority of my time in a small cubicle testing applications and providing routine minimalistic changes to applications as per leadership directive, with little or no interaction between myself and anyone outside the team in which I was assigned.  Unfortunately, I cannot say I was pleased with the conciseness of application architecture on the AS/400   Emerging technologies enabled some modernization of applications, however, the fundamental programming approach was all too often left to the intellectually cluttered devices of development staff in years past and standards of development were sketchy & sometimes even frowned upon by technical staff.  It was fortunate the programming languages were configured to allow application development within the construct of the language's architecture, as developers rarely took the time to simply tidy up the organizational placement of new logic in the applications and merge it with existent language stricture to visual benefit.  During my tenure with the company, I was granted participation in several relatively major project initiatives. These initiatives were successfully implemented with ongoing support & fairly perpetual oversight via on-call support that was not compensated.  I was only occasionally given a say in how to set about developing applications, and was chastised & reprimanded for advocating the idea of refreshing application structure to meaningfully organize architectural construct within programs & bring the architecture up-to-date for relevance to current business. In short, we were held bound to support a system that really wasn't consistently well-developed to any collective standard in many respects, and also disciplined against inroads toward structural clean-up in applications. Towards the end of my employment I was directly marginalized in my ability to voice concerns about evident employee behavior and the negative impact behavioral patterns had on my morale and subsequent diminished desire to put forth a best effort towards productive ends within the company.  Employees bound to one another by committed personal affairs, legal and otherwise, are granted lien to flaunt their positions on issues of controversy relentlessly, without regard to collective morale.  And those granted privilege to the vast majority of financial prowess were not always schooled in reasonable demonstrations of authority.  Disrespect has become the typical model of character in the workplace, isolation and evasiveness the accepted approach to behavioral conflict. On numerous occasions I have been berated as immature, a consequence for simply voicing a concern about lack of complete structural integrity within programs, and moreover, lack of children within my household set against a backdrop of child-rearing coworkers who are mutually employed by one & the same company, essentially enabling & encouraging shows of strength within company circles by parties of joint employment interest.  Furthermore, bullying is held acceptable and shows of cloistered strength are commonplace.  Duplicitous behavior is acknowledged, and quite possibly even encouraged, within leadership circles.  If a person holding a position of authority doesn't agree with someone who holding a position of lesser repute within the company at large, bullying tactics are surreptitiously granted lien.
I won't provide names, but SpartanNash company for me had grown to be a rather inhospitable work environment, with work space irrationally confined and and work environment profligate with mediocre standards of development and interpersonal behavior, sometimes championed by the leadership itself, which lends voice to personal opinion and largely ignores reasonable concerns raised by those employees left to work amongst themselves in the tightly knit rows of cubes.  
I do not think SpartanNash is demonstrating levels of accomplishment, culturally and architecturally (with regard to applications AND work environment), that are to be upheld for the long-term collective benefit of its widely varied & diverse employee demographic.  I encourage introspective, innovative, and also quite importantly, considerate people to seek pasture in greener climes.

Internship pros:
• On-site Starbucks with discounted drinks
• On-site cafe with affordable meal options
• Really good compensation, from an intern’s perspective
• SpartanNash paid for my housing downtown at GVSU - fight for
• Comfortable working environment at the GRDC corporate office
• Opportunities to connect with professionals and make friends
• A few networking opportunities where I got to meet really awesome people
• SpartanNash discounts at Family Fare
• Free LinkedIn Learning
• Cool volunteer opportunities
• Admissions team recruited me on Handshake and highly encouraged me to apply
• My roles/responsibilities matched well with the original job description 
• Overall, my experience with my team was positive
SpartanNash adds important portfolio pieces and experience
• Enjoyed my experience getting to know my manager, mentor, and fellow interns


Internship cons:
• Intense interview process
• Ambiguity of full-time promotion -- The position was advertised and explained in interviews as well as post-hiring as a near-certain employment opportunity post-graduation. SpartanNash has expressed that the goal for their internship program is to hire as many interns as possible, but 14% hiring rate on our team is pretty embarrassing. I understand if our team specifically doesn’t have the budget, but then SpartanNash needs to be better about disclosing the exclusivity of a job offer.
• It is unprofessional to allude to a job offer after the summer and wait until the very last day of the internship to let us know if we have an offer or not
• No overtime whatsoever permitted for interns. I’m not really sure how small businesses can afford it but not SpartanNash, especially when the overtime work is needed, and interns have to sign away their hours over 40 as a donation to the company
• Some SpartanNash Associates will defend SpartanNash to no end, even when a situation is mishandled or goes wrong. Leadership can come off as out of touch
• SpartanNash has done a brilliant job of marketing social media competitions to get free positive promotion online by the interns. Competitions and social media activities are encouraged for prizes — it doesn’t feel authentic to me. I’d be wary of some of the positivity online, since surely interns (and even full-time associates) are in a position where they need to maintain positive connections (myself included)
• I’m not sure how SpartanNash intends to have 300 interns when they can’t even properly manage 106. Multiple managers want very little to do with their interns, and many interns struggle to stay busy/find anything to do or gain experience from, resulting in a lot of interns that are frustrated with their experience here
• This could be a side effect of working for corporate, but my job responsibilities were limited in creativity and magnitude. I feel insignificant here and the work sometimes got monotonous. I don’t entirely fault SpartanNash for this; interns are at the very bottom of the work chain so I can understand why some of that happens. I’ve just never experienced it to this degree.
• Imbalance in internships -- some interns bored all day with nothing to do while their managers assign me tasks

**Group Capstone Projects themselves presented issues:
• Consumed a significant amount of my internship, and was extremely stressful
• Feedback process was inefficient from capstone leaders, and direction was sometimes minimal.
• Capstone leaders expressed disappointment with our progress despite their unrealistic expectations of the project. Frustration from interns and leaders.
• We had no say in what the Capstone was, and probably didn’t win because the project didn’t create new and innovative solutions for the company. It’s a project that’s already been done, and we just made another edition.

They'll tell you they're a "People First" culture, but they're not. You can't even afford to shop at the store you work at! Oooooh, a 10% discount? Whoopee!  Most retailers these days are offering 15 %. Which brings me to my next point: SpartanNash is way behind on the times. They want you to do more and more and more but they limit each stores hours. Then they cry because other stuff isn't getting done. So what do they do? Push you some more! They expect you to do in one day what any other retailer expects in 2. The scheduling is a joke. They move people from days to nights then make it your problem that stuff isn't being filled during peak hours. Yeah, that isn't stressful at all. Front end staff is useless. They constantly page other people from other departments away to go fix the bottle room for them or go get carts rather than doing the logical thing and designating one person to do that stuff (it's called a "courtesy clerk", Spartan. Try it out sometime). So you didn't get your tasks done and now management is upset even though they're lazy and won't go get carts or fix the bottle machines, which are over 20 years old by the way. They won't buy new machines or pay people a livable wage because they don't have the money, but they'll go and buy robots for every store to "check the shelves"? Makes sense, doesn't it? Invest your money in stupid things rather than investing it into your stores or the employees. Brilliant! And I swear to God, management is USELESS. They will allow the front end staff to page people up from doing work like stocking shelves, receiving or cutting meat or working produce for register backup, carts and the bottle room rather than taking initiative and doing it themselves or assigning someone who is right there to do it. Talk about LAZY. Management shuns any good idea you have and sticks to the old ways even if your idea will benefit everybody. They'll likely comment on this saying they do care and bragging about their people first culture - which doesn't really exist - instead of addressing the issues. They'd likely rather pay all these big shots to visit stores and pay for their fuel and lodging and tell you the company can't afford to pay you a livable wage than actually doing something about it. They keep pushing for more and giving less. Their prices are extortion. I've seen their freight bills. They will pay 2k for a meat pallet and charge the customer 5k. Lol, what a joke. Then they wonder why they're losing sales? Could it be because you're overpriced and customers are done with it?!?!?! Noooooo, that can't be! Keep on the road you're on, Spartan. All this stuff going on in stores and not one of you can stop and ask employees without fear of retaliation what you all can do to make it better. Yeah, keep having people pulled from dairy and meat and receiving go fill your cheap carts for you or tend to your severely outdated bottle machines because you allow your front end staff to do nothing and get paid for it. Keep dumping money into stuff we don't need like robots rather than into your outdated stores and underpaid employees. You keep on. Eventually those doors will close for good. Happy employees= Happy customers = Winning recipe.  You're losing. 

I should've said no to the job when the interviewer kept asking me if I was sure if I wanted the job repeatedly. The corporate office is the only nice facility SpartanNash has. The Grocery warehouse is dirty and often times you will smell food rotting. I saw three birds and one mouse in my time of being there. A "standard" work week is 72 hours. Your "days off" will consist of working 8 hours instead of twelve hours. You will be working seven days a week including holidays (Easter is not a recognized holiday). You get one raise a year. You can only miss 4 days during the 90 day trial period. Good luck if you get sick during that time since 7 days a week is mandatory. SpartanNash has to be the most depressing place I have EVER worked. Each week you have to bid for your schedule and there's a chance you will be forced to a shift you don't want to be on. Everything at SpartanNash revolves around being forced. There's no incentive to stay at the job. You won't receive a 401k until after a year of working there. You won't receive any vacation time until after a year of working there and you will only get one week. Everything is based on seniority and if you're new; you're basically a SpartanNash slave. Management doesn't care about what's going on and doesn't do a good job managing their employees. Each day they will announce that you will be working "compulsory" overtime. I never once heard a positive announcement over the loud speaker. Even management sounds like they hate their lives. The people that have stuck around are pretty decent and will do what they can to help you, but morale is extremely low and more and more employees are fed up with working 7 days a week for practically nothing.

Your training will be for 2 days and then you're on your own. Most learning comes from word of mouth and asking other employees as management doesn't tell you much. What you learn basically depends on what trainer volunteers to train you. There basically is no standard training system. 

The headset system SpartanNash utilizes is terrible. You most likely will constantly be repeating yourself to the headset and telling it that you did not request the operation it is trying to do. For example if you breathe in sharply or are just riding around on a handcart saying nothing, the headset will say that you wanted to suspend a job.

I can't recommend staying away from this job enough unless you have no other choice

I’ve been with this company for 5 years now. Everything started alright by over the course of the past 3 years or so things have been declining drastically. While I enjoy the department that I work in and my fellow employees there I have little to no respect for the head store managers we currently have. They are inattentive, fail to communicate with their workers, and don’t resolve problems that occur. 

My department is run down, we have many things that are necessary for our jobs to run smoothly that are broken and have been broken for some time now. They refuse to fix these problems due to “budget constraints”. 

You have to fight tooth and nail to get hours at store I work at. Each department is allotted a certain amount of hours each week depending on the previous weeks sales. My manager tries to make sure these hours are evenly distributed but there are weeks where (especially during our slower months) that I do not get the hours I need to survive or meet the required hours to maintain my insurance. 

The benefits are basically a joke. While the paid vacation is nice you have to meet certain requirements before you can even obtain them. The 401k is alright for what you pay for. They recently added more health/dental insurance options that are way cheaper than any of the plans they’ve had the previous years. Problem is that you have to average 30 hours over a year to even qualify for this. 

Compensation is my biggest complaint about this company. At my store, the current hiring wage is $10/hr. As I stated above I’ve been here for 5 years and I’m currently making only 65¢ above their hiring wage. We get a yearly “raise” (if you want to call it that). The most they give you for a raise is 50¢ if you’re lucky. One year I got a whopping 10¢ raise. The only times I ever got a dollar raise was when my state changed the minimum wage from the federal wage to $9/hr over the course of two years.  Yet they can afford to pay their CEOs 5 million+ a year. 

Corporate is the second worst thing about this company besides the pay. They make decisions that hurt the department that I work in. They really like to push new promotional deals with little to no explication given to us so WE can understand it, get rid of items for no reason in our system, or just plain ignore the fact that not every store can make the same sales as the ones in the bigger areas. 

All in all, I would not reccomend working for this company if you have the choice. Find someone who will pay you fairly.

I'm a night crew stocker, my job mainly is building the front wall, stocking shelves, and scrubbing and buffing floors. Here at Martins if you r thinking of joining the night crew please read my review. There are problems with a lot of the stores with pay you start of at 8.90 an hour that's good compared to other grocery stores. That's a completive wage, I've gone up over 9.00 an hour. My position maxes out at 12.00 but Martins is cheap they don't care about there employees when it comes to a livable wage don't except to make a carrier out of this job because most people don't reach there max and make around 10.30 after like 3 or 4 years. they never go up too 12 an hour. And if you do go up to 12 an hour it will take 9 years basically a long time. I used to work hard but now I take short cuts and only work anuf so I can keep my job, often times not following rules, and wasting time. I got tired of working hard and not being able to pay my bills and be in debt every week. Also with the low pay, the night crew you have no socially life and its not worth the pay also expect to deal with a lot of complaints and annoying night crew workers. Only worth applying if your looking for a temporally job with cheap health care and you live at home, not a carrier job. Your better of at a factory with no social life, and make 11-15 an hour. Good news is the job is easy and you have a lot of freedoms. Martins say they care and they do when it comes too health care and paid time of but when it comes to pay there cheap and don't care about there employees. Instead they need to start paying Night crew stockers and other positions more, and maybe then they would get better results, money is motivation. Also Martins lacks communication between workers and management, with this improved some of our stores would actually make money instead of going in debt every year. I have a lot of good ideas but nobody will listen too you if your not the manager or the store manager, so I said screw it this job is under paid why should I care about Martins making money. If I cant even pay my bills.

You will be frequently lifting packages that range in weight from 2-100lbs. Some of these cases may be down low on the ground which requires you to squat and reach several feet into a slot space to get these heavy boxes. You will have to bend and twist your back while doing this. because that is how it is set up. Back injuries are very common in this position. This job requires moving from subzero temperatures to hot and humid areas. Even if you're completely soaked from sweat they will send you into the freezer where you will then get extremely cold. Everything at SaprtanNash is done by seniority; scheduling, and work assignments. When you get hired on it will take years to get a decent schedule and work assignments that keep you in one area. Most of the shifts are evenings with MADATORY sundays starting at 8:30 a.m. which ruins your Saturday. Every few months there is a schedule change and you wont know what it will be until you bid on your schedule. Bidding is done by seniority so, at first do not expect a good schedule. Frequent schedule changes make committing to anything outside of this job almost impossible. In short; extremely hard work (most of the older guys walk like they are broken at this job), Long hours 10+(longest shift I worked was an 18 hour day on a Sunday), short breaks, Management doesn't listen, I flat out caught them lying to me several times. Some co-workers are extremely hostile. It's common to get cussed out by a co worker because they may feel you are slowing them down (which happens to everyone, basically some guys at this job do not want to be inconvenienced in any way, but hey that is just a part of life). Which affects their productivity bonus. Yes, their is a weekly hourly incentive bonus based on your productivity. However this creates a one for all mentality instead of an all for one. There is little to no team work. Unless you're desperate and can not find work anywhere else. I would not apply for this position.

I would probably try to work here for awhile so you can learn how a warehouse works, but I wouldn't make this a career unless you can get a job in the administrative area or be a truck driver or something. Don't try to get a job as an order selector or anything unless you don't have a choice. Most of the guys you work with are okay, but you can get stuck with some guys that may try to fight you or threaten you for no reason. I think they need to start doing drug tests so they can get rid of some of the guys there too. I don't think marijuana smoking should be allowed at work either (I'm not some kind of anti-marijuana fanatic or anything. I just don't think people should do it at work). 

The schedule is pretty reasonable. Four days a week. Three days off. But when you work there, you could get stuck there for a very long time. I've had to work from noon to past midnight on a few occasions, and I've even heard that they had to work from noon to ten the next morning, which is unreasonable and inhumane too. 
The pay and the benefits seem pretty solid if you're willing to work hard for that. But remember that they're going to pressure about getting a high percentage rate everyday you're there. They probably won't fire you if you don't get a high percentage all the time, but they will pressure you alot about it. Some of the guys get a little cocky when they get a high percentage, but I think that system is just there to make you work harder for no benefit (if there is a benefit, correct me if I'm wrong. But I just don't see it). 

You can learn a lot from working here, and the pay and benefits are good. But I wouldn't recommend the order selector position unless you plan on moving to an administrative position, a truck driver position at some point, or even a better job.  

This company doesn’t care about the employees, they claim they do but then they change your schedule and have you work 6-7 days a week because they can.  Some of the managers are actually pretty good but the bad ones like the perishable supervisor make the entire company look bad.  He acts like he’s looking out for everybody’s best interest but then sits there and talks about other managers behind their backs, and god forbid you call in.  He’s definitely talking about your female problems or your personal life.  And don’t bother applying here if you have a felony, they only allow those in management.  They could careless about the employees, they claim they do because “who else spends money on steak lunches for employees”.  Well maybe if you treated employees right you wouldn’t have to bribe them with steak lunches and don’t pretend like you bought anything for the employees.  You simply wrote off some steaks from inside the warehouse and cooked them.  This company could be a decent place if they would replace some of the managers/supervisors and the shady unethical leads that bring down morale and stop letting HR brush things under the rug.  If you ever have any issues don’t bother going to HR, just call the ethics line and go over HR’s head, otherwise they will downplay it and make you feel like your feelings or experience is invalid.  And speaking of HR, god forbid you ever decide to resign or give notice.  She will give you dirty looks and close doors in your face because your quitting so why should she pretend to care even a little.  And to sum it up.  Don’t work here. It’s not worth the money they pay to deal with the headaches.

The $20/hr they announce for new hires makes the job sound better than it really is. They have a PFP program to pay more on the hour if you complete your orders faster than the goal, but the system's rigged to make sure nobody ever gets the top payout (or even within 20% of the top payout) and the performance goal just to stay employed is difficult enough to where seasoned employees struggle to meet it.

This performance goal is more important than accuracy, safety or how well you stack the pallets so they don't fall over in the trucks. They mention a 90-day training period but they only really train you for a week. You'll spend two days watching videos and another three with a trainer, and then you're expected to meet full production quota by week 6. If you haven't met the quota by then, the disciplinary process begins until they terminate you and start hiring the next batch of workers that they'll eventually do the same thing to.

While it's just warehouse work and doesn't sound that difficult, the pace they force there means damaged product is often just left on the floor for days because cleaning counts against your goal which can lead to your termination. Equipment rarely works properly, so things like a bad pallet jack or bad headset will also count against your performance for the day, which can also lead to your termination.

At the end of the day, you'll at least get a couple months of paychecks so if you're just in need of something temporary until the next thing comes along, it's good for that but if you have something stable already I wouldn't just leave it for the extra couple dollars on the hour because there's a good chance you'll be gone in 3 months.


Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Order picker 11 salaries reported	$20.36 per hour
Deli associate 5 salaries reported	$15.00 per hour
Forklift operator 10 salaries reported	$20.25 per hour
Truck driver 1 salary reported	$65,000 per year
Cashier 3 salaries reported	$14.83 per hour

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