Pros
It is kind of cool to meet people's pets while at work. Generally speaking, the environment can be pretty relaxed as far as how people get along. Each store can be different
Cons
Checklists. Trackers. Emails. Conference calls. Printouts for the "brand board" . This job has the most redundant an inefficient stuff I have ever seen. There are FOUR separate opening duties checklists, most of which carry on throughout the day to be done. No one ever looks at these EVER. In my 5 years there, the DM has not once looked at them or mentioned them. It's a bit like a paint by numbers job. The company slogan last year was a very ironic "Do the Right Thing".... A few months later, PTO now cannot be carried over from one year to the next, there is no cushion at all. And the excuse was " we are in line with other retailers". Same old MBA bandwagon stuff. There is redundant paperwork everywhere. Petco might save some pets, but they kill a couple million trees and always try to claim to be a green company. They just now in 2015 figured out that they have to pay more than minimum wage for groomers PTO to actually get and retain talent. This little bit of data should have been realized a couple of decades ago. That they should qualify for raises shouldnt have been this hard to figure out. Technical systems for Petco are a complete nightmare and older than dirt. Anytime a new tech is introduced to the store it barely works and usually just creates more inefficiencies than it helps. The DC and supply chain for the area I worked in was the most unreliable ever. Payroll crunch is normall, but Petco takes it to extremes. Good luck getting anything done. A general manager make 60k a year should not spend the majority of his time doing manual labor that you can get done for $9 an hour. Speaking of payrates, Walmart now starts out higher than Petco and you dont have to clean dog poo up there. Corporate jobs such as buyers and floorplan and pog team often complicate the stores job by not doing thier own jobs on time. Pay raises are ridiculous: People especially got screwed this year with aligning all pay raises to the same date instead of employee anniversaries. Some of my really good employees only got .15 for a period of 18 months, and they rated as exceeded expectations. I havent even gotten in to animal care and standards...