Pros
Autozone is a good starting point for those just starting to enter the job market. To their credit Autozone hires many minorities, new immigrants to this country and students in need of part time work. With so many stores finding employment with Autozone in your own neighborhood is a real plus. If Retail is your chosen field the experience at Autozone can help your resume. Everyone at the store level is expected to cover all store positions from cleaning the bathrooms, inventory control, POS duty, LP and store management. After a year at an Autozone store you are truly a well rounded Retail expert.
Cons
Confusion and an over tasked agenda is an everyday challenge at Autozone for not just store employees but also field management. Communication at the executive level is very poor, so all too often conflicting tasks or projects are delegated weekly to field and store management. Autozone is very focused on stock performance and stock annalist recommendations and continue to cut expenses and labor to the point that many stores are dysfunctional and not up to company standards. Training is very poor, and almost nonexistent. New employees spend their first day on the job at an orientation meeting. The next day they are in the store and have to hope the Store Manager has a training plan in place. All training is OJT and since you are trained by a peer that follows no guidelines, since that is how they were trained, procedures and proper execution of duties is not consistent or familiar from store to store. Of concern also is that due to the high churn rate of employees there is no drug testing on new hires and some negative background checks are ignored due to the pressure to fill open positions. At the Regional level and stores most Managers do a good job and really work on calling out employees for praise for jobs well done. But at the Division and Corporate level most feedback to Regional and lower employees is mostly negative. Corporate discourages any feedback or suggestions from any level of management we all learned that one wrong statement or suggestion can lose you your job. Hence Corporate is not in touch with the realties and challenges of running a store, and also never hear suggestions that could improve operations and the bottom line.