Pros
Some friendly coworkers 35% employee discount Weekdays typically not busy
Cons
Managers will give you different and sometimes contradictory instructions depending on which ones you ask. I once got yelled at by a restaurant manager for doing what a retail manager asked me to do. Weekends are HORRIBLE. Especially Sundays. Expect the snobbiest, most entitled customers you've ever met nitpicking your every move, one after another, for hours on end. If you're a decent worker, expect your manager to try to schedule you for Sundays every single week in perpetuity unless you threaten to quit. Apparently the guys in the dishroom used to clean the restrooms (seeing that they are already properly equipped to do so) but now they force the retail salespeople to do it. If you leave the restroom alone for thirty minutes and come back, it will be disgusting again 99% of the time. There will be wet paper towels and toilet paper stuck to the floor, there will be literal crap smeared on the toilets or fingerprinted on the walls, there will be an overwhelming stench of excrement looming overhead and you alone will be expected to fix it. On weekends they can be impossible to clean because customers will often move in and out of the stalls like a revolving door for hours. Expect a least one clogged toilet every Sunday shift. If you show up every day and do your work, the managers will take notice, not to show appreciation, but to load more work onto you that the other team members have been slacking off on. You will get lots of "promotions" (with no pay raises or added benefits of any kind) that obligate you to do the most menial work possible. They will have you unpacking and sorting through mountains of boxes, constructing over-complicated visual displays according to specific corporate planograms, sorting hundreds upon hundreds of items of clothing with an eleven page thick packet checklist, etc. while your coworkers stand behind the unopened register all day getting payed the same rate (or higher). The corporate managers are OBNOXIOUS. They show up at least once a week (almost always on the weekends) and oftentimes more. They stand around the shop staring at the employees to see if they are forcing products on the customers hard enough, or if they're reading the sale signs aloud to the customers often enough. If you make a big sale or a customer gives you praise, and they didn't see it, it didn't happen. Some of them like to focus on individual employees for about a minute at a time. If the person doesn't attempt to sell something in that time span the corporate manager will write their name down and someone will come to talk to them about "the Cracker Barrel mission." The pay sucks. There is a lingering aura of distrust among the management towards the bottom level employees. Your uniform is patted down at the end of every shift to make sure you didn't steal anything. Only one employee (always the retail manager or a "senior" employee) can have keys to the back stockroom at a time, which makes the basic duties of the job significantly harder. If you need something from the back, you need their permission first. There are two card readers on the register, one of which faces the customer and is out of the cashier's reach because they are not trusted with credit cards (keep in mind that the other card reader is used for everything else, and this often confuses customers and new employees to no end). Absolutely NO standards for hiring. Be prepared to work with junkies and freaks if you get this job. I am pretty sure some of the cooks were illegals.