Pros
You get out of it what you put into it, mostly. You get to appreciate animal care, learn about pet food, learn about business, I have worked many worse places. I think the benefits are decent. I have a family member working for a bigger company in management and Petco does a better job with benefits and PTO. You do have the tools to care for animals if you educate yourself on your own time as to what you need to do so this is a pro/con. Hours/ work life is manageable if you are part of a store with a good management team. Usually if you need help with a situation like staffing, products, questions etc you can reach out to your peers in other stores and get really good support. This company does empower you to refuse an animal sale if you believe it is not in the best interest of the animal. That is important to me- that wouldn't happen at a Wal-mart.
Cons
It's hard to attract a good workforce while paying minimum wage. Computer training modules are awful. DMs have too many stores so they don't really babysit the terrible GM's. The vendors that supply animals to Petco are suspect. Computer system in pretty bad, crashes a lot. IT is, of course, in India and very painful to deal with. My DM gives us guidelines for scheduling and business practices on conference calls and my present and past GMs consistently undermine them. Never enough payroll to do the tasks you are "accountable" for. Too many managers and not enough associates. Management training is the blind leading the blind. Petco "care sheets" are laughable and training on animal care is lacking in a sad, sad way. Upper management is flip-floppy on standards. I'm not a groomer, but this company treats groomers poorly. My full time grooming salon manager does a good job, has a client base, and made less than $16k last year. This company demands that you sell dog training classes each week but provides NO PAYROLL to teach them. Because we are successful at selling classes we literally lose sales associates hours to dog training classes. This is absurd! This company expects more out of you than they should for the amount of time/ resources they give you.