Pros
Worked for Target for 3.5years - started as seasonal and was brought on full time and eventually added to Electronics dept. It was fun at first, made a lot of friends and felt like good employee morale, especially for the hourly folks we felt like we were in the trenches together. So lots of good memories making the time pass and working towards a team goal, especially closing shift. Good bonding.
Cons
Lots of personalities to deal with, team leaders were power hungry and try to exert more power than they actually had. Executive team leaders were almost nowhere to be found whenever you needed them, usually up in the office sitting around and talking all the time. Some of these issues you will encounter at any retail job, but at Target it for sure got worse overtime as they kept cutting retail floor positions to get leaner.. which meant work would double on the remaining staff. We used to have a solid one person per department usually 3pm-closing. Now they have reduced everyone's hours and you typically have people working 6pm-close, which cuts back on how much time they have to reset and clean their areas. It hurt pretty bad. So pay went up, but hours went down, and expectations doubled. And you're constantly being pulled away to help others and then you get chewed out for not finishing your departments tasks... makes perfect sense. If you were a hard worker, they would take advantage of you and pile even more on you.. without any recognition or reward. ETLs played favorites and slackers would get recognition and everyone else would be ignored, asked to do more, etc. It got to a point where most of us stopped caring and we would just do the minimum to get by because they were not recognizing the hardest of workers, which eventually would quit. Turnover was a problem for sure, new folks nearly every week and it was hard to train people that only stayed for a few weeks and then quit because they didn't like the workload. Employee benefits used to be ok, but they reduced the employee discount and it cant be used on clearance items. The ETLs would hold weekly meetings and treat themselves to feasts and then move the scraps to the breakroom for the hourly people... this happened on almost a weekly basis. It was just dirty.. and further put space between hourly and salary staff. Opportunity to move upwards were not provided often, your team leaders and ETLs usually were the longest employed team members so if they don't leave, you can't move up. All in all, if I could do it all over again, I would not have worked for target, but rather tried for a different retailer. Most of my friends had better experiences at W-mart and other places, so that's my regret but you live and learn.