Pros
Pros are the free grooming training and paid time off.
Cons
As a groomer, you are paid 50% commission on the dogs you do. What you’re not paid for is playing receptionist alll day long on top of your already busy schedule, having to act as a sales person to push packages and add ons just to meet weekly quotas, deal with an incredibly slow system, a manager who would refuse to help us out and would try to assign bathers to help us out instead of him doing it, even though the bathers were also very overworked. We were lucky if we got lunch breaks and lucky to leave at your scheduled time to get off. Our manager always told us “just cause you’re scheduled to get off at ‘x’ time doesn’t mean that’s when you’re actually off.” So a lot of groomers ended up working 10+ hours a day and being told to clock out for lunch and to clock out at the right time and to just work off the clock.. I’m pretty sure that was illegal. When anyone would try to speak up to corporate and hr, every person was ignored. I was there for a little over 8 years and never once did the district manager care to hear the issues within our salon. The only thing they care about is money and hitting your percentages. During last years Covid breakout, our manager would make people come in even though they weren’t feeling well because “they didn’t have anymore sick days”. There was a groomer who quit from our managers lack of care regarding the global pandemic. Even after leaving this place, there have been messages sent to some people who no longer work there telling us how bad it has gotten. We have been told about some rough conditions animals have been put through by our old manager that they brought to their higher up and it was completely ignored. The manager was actually told who sent the email and was making the workers job even harder and singling them out. This place is horrible to their workers and could care less about the safety of the animals, only has policies for the “safety” of the animal to help them on the legal end of things. I would not recommend this place to work or to take your dog. I definitely wouldn’t trust a Petsmart grooming salon with my dog. I’ve seen how stressed some groomers can get and how rough they can be with dogs, my old manager included. It took a horrible toll on my mental health working at this place, but once I quit, I realized how a job doesn’t have to be such a bad place to go!
