Pros
My coworkers in the grooming salon were the absolute best. They and the dogs are the only reason I survived Petco for the 3 years I was there. The job itself, apart from the micromanaging corporate nonsense that I'll get into later, was great. I enjoyed the opportunity Petco gave me to move up from a bather to a groomer. That's a skill I never thought I'd have, but I'm so glad I do now. The pay was also good, but now that they've reworked the pay system for the groomers I don't think it'd be worth it.
Cons
The demands of the higher management were outrageously difficult to meet , and yet they expected us to meet them while perfectly following every arbitrary rule and, at times, without basic equipment and supplies. For example, at one point in the salon we were under-staffed and struggling to handle the demand of clients wanting appointments. We were expected to take on extra dogs during our shifts while still answering every phone call, taking every walk-in nail trim, making reminder calls, taking a full 30 minute lunch, filling out all the required paperwork, and maintaining the cleanliness of our equipment and salon. We were also told that we would be severely penalized if we had any overtime at the end of the week. Basically, do more work, but don't you dare take more time to do it. And, inevitably, when we had a full staff of groomers, we hit kennel capacity and could not take any more dogs; we were penalized for not maintaining sales growth. No matter how hard we worked, we were always told to do more and be better, but we were given no support to do so. Broken washing machines or dryers for towels would sometimes go weeks without getting fixed no matter how much we called and asked about the progress on our work order, and in the meantime we were expected to take the time to go to a laundromat without letting it interfere with our sales or make us go overtime. The stress and burnout is very, very real. The salon I worked at used to have 6 groomers, two of whom worked there for about 10 years; all but one has left now, and the salon only has two groomers total.