Pros
As with most businesses, there there are some genuinely kind, amicable people doing good work here. There weren't many at my store; most were just putting on an act for customers and management. But the few that were truly caring people deserve mention in this review. My fondest memories of working here are those in which I did simple things to help customers: showing them the locations of items in the large Home department, making the keys that would ensure they could get into their houses, mixing the paints that would wind up on the walls of their first child's nursery. I wish I'd had more of that and less getting yelled at for taking a pee break.
Cons
Unfortunately, my particular Fred Meyer proved to be a poor first work experience. Management ran the gamut from needlessly strict to actively abusive. I was ultimately laid off from my part-time job when the "new" (Fred Meyer rotates their managerial staff between stores with some frequency) manager, a man whose return made the more veteran women of my department attempt to switch to different parts of the store, and who, I was told some time in advance, was looking for a reason to fire me, deliberately engineered a situation that gave him the weakest of justifications to kick me out of the store. What problem he had with me, I never figured out; I was only a part-time employee, and I was never less than kind or courteous to a customer in my short stay at the store. You'd think even a misogynistic sociopath would have bigger fish to fry than me. But he fired me; called me in, took my badge and papers, and sent me off with a smile on his face. It was the single creepiest work experience I've had before, or since. The union, membership of which is mandatory at the store, did nothing to help me. They said I couldn't even petition for their help, since I was two or three days short of the ninety-day "trial period," or whatever it's called. That didn't stop them from taking a hearty chunk out of all my paychecks up to that point, and if they weren't willing to do anything to help me, then they shouldn't have been taking my money.