Pros
You learn the ins and outs of three industries - shipping, printing, and retail - which offers you a diversity of transferable skills. There are decent benefits to the position (even for part-timers) including, but not limited to, tuition reimbursement, health coverage, personal assistance programs, and so on and so forth. You also receive a hefty discount for FedEx Express services, and there are quarterly bonuses so long as you achieve your centre's allotted sales goal. There are also minor incentive bonuses you can take advantage of. The culture itself is generally welcoming, and you will likely be working within a small team (less than ten individuals or so), which means you'll almost certainly develop good rapports with your co-workers. Centre management can be hit or miss from what I've heard, but I lucked out with a genuinely friendly and knowledgeable manager. If you are pitted with an unsatisfactory manager and/or team, you have options to transfer. The work itself is not very difficult and can be rather enjoyable at times, so long as you are willing to put some thought and effort into it. You will always meet clients with fascinating stories, and usually they come back. Helping people print and finish their artistic passion projects, or helping a person send urgent shipments and alleviating great stress on their end, is always gratifying.
Cons
Wages are not proportional to the work you are expected to put in and the industries you are expected to learn - in other words, you may be underpaid. You WILL be pulled in multiple directions at the same time (again, three domains you work in) and it will be overwhelming, especially when you don't have everything down pat; individuals who dislike frequent multitasking need not apply. Your hours live and die based on upper management's decisions (your centre is given a set payroll budget for each month), so one week you can have 35 hours whereas the next they'll be cut in half. Any concerns to centre management regarding compensation and hours will probably fall on deaf ears, not because they dislike you, but rather their hands are tied. This brings us to the issue of upper management itself - the company has very outdated communications infrastructure (many centres still run on dial-up transaction systems, and all other systems contain numerous bugs/glitches) that are a cause of daily frustration and make occasionally burdensome processes that much more burdensome. Upper management acknowledges these issues, of course, but has made painfully little progress towards ameliorating them. Upper management also employs a wishful thinking tactic, in that they hope to buck the downward economic trend that is the printing industry with unrealistic sales goals and expectations. If you fail to meet these goals your centre will experience a setback of some kind (typically payroll), which isn't quite fair to team members as they have relatively little impact on customer intake - marketing is practically non-existent, and any attempts to expand reach are bogged down by corporate bureaucracy. In essence, upper management expects to conjure clientele out of thin air. As aforementioned, you will probably work with a small team. One of the cons to this is that any weaknesses team members have and any issues that bubble up will become conversation topics among co-workers, and it can create an occasionally toxic atmosphere due to unnecessary politics. If you're stuck with a team member who isn't up to par, you will have to deal with it, and you will not be thanked for it. Even though you can transfer if it gets too much to handle, it still doesn't feel acceptable. Customers are generally pleasant to deal with in the grand scheme of things, but as with any service location you will receive your fair share of irrational, irritable, and explosive individuals. There is little synergy between Office and the delivery branches, and half of your customer inquiries will be with regards to FedEx Express and Ground services (think a package that is in transit or out for delivery), and unfortunately there is nothing you can do as you are a separate operating company entirely, and these constant spiels eat up a significant portion of your time. People don't take well to this, and that's understandable, considering it is a company under the FedEx banner and it is not entirely clear by the name that it's primarily a print centre.