Pros
You are union protected, that is about all that is good about working at Fred Meyer.
Cons
They do not care about you, they do not care if you are a high school student, they will schedule you so that you literally have to go straight from school to work and stay until 11:00, which is late enough as it is, and then they will make you stay until 12:00 or 1:00 in the morning. Then you have homework and don't get to sleep until 2:00 at the earliest, then you wake up at 6:30 and do it again in many instances. Oh and if you try to raise an issue with that, or change your availability slightly, they will cut your hours down to your contract minimum, which for me is 12 hours. I have heard my assistant manager say that school doesn't matter and we should just stay with the company, she has attempted to discourage high schoolers from going to college and has talked to those in college about dropping out to work full time. If you ask for a schedule change to better fit your college schedule, you better bet they will give you an extremely hard time, happened to one of my coworkers who has now quit. They will make you miss all of your family get togethers and work Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Years Eve, New Years, and so on, then the one time you request Memorial Day off because your parents booked a vacation they will be upset and attempt to make you feel bad. My manager told me that if I wasn't a minor and if I was 18 he wouldn't have given me the time off and would have made me work it instead of allowing me to go on vacation with my family even though I had talked to him about it months before the vacation and he had said it was fine. Management plays favorites, they will buy and sell marijuana and alcohol to MINOR employees and then report you for something you said because they don't like you, when 75% of the conversations they have with your coworkers that they sell marijuana and alcohol to would get them placed in a disciplinary meeting. I have asked at least 25 other employees who are not management if they like working at Fred Meyer, one has said they liked it, almost all feel like they are mistreated and walked on, and most just want to get away from the company. Another thing I have been told is that Fred Meyer was an amazing company to work for before Kroger bought them out. A normal conversation topic for us while we are working is how much we hate working for Fred Meyer, and the sad part is that it could be a really great company, but the management is horrible. They work us with not having enough employees on shift in our department and it puts us behind, which they blame on us, when in reality its their fault for trying to do more with less, it doesn't work, stop trying to save money and just do it the right way. When we got our new assistant manager she decided that it would be a good idea to add more to our work load, even though a majority of the time we don't get everything done as it is, it has been a great experience working for Fred Meyer. Everyday I have to go into work or even when I think about having to go to work my entire body fills with anxiety, currently trying to find a new job. I have been working at Fred Meyer for around 8 months and I can't imagine working there for another month, if I don't find a job soon, I am giving my two weeks regardless, that is how bad it is. I remember when a coworker of mine accidentally hurt herself, she "ruined the stores safety record" so everyone wasn't going to get a freaking pizza party, people were so rude to her she actually started crying, and the manager was pissed because he was going to have to go to a meeting or whatever on safety, he wasn't at all concerned about her. He had specific things that he told her she couldn't do, and would tell her to stop doing them if he saw her doing them, because he didn't want her to hurt herself again, while letting other employees do the same things.