Pros
Benefits: one week Paid Vacation, Birthday Bonus (paid one extra work day), Profit Sharing- Holiday Bonus (before Black Friday), Retirement-401K (stocks), Medical, Life Insurance. Corporately speaking, Food Lion is indeed heading in an overall "good" direction. If one is lucky enough to be hired by a "competent" general manager, life can be great on the job. Though all floor employees are the "face" of Food Lion, the general managers are even more so. I was blessed to be able to work under and with a very unusually talented and competent gm. Everything about his store prospered under this particular gm. His whole management team was infected with his work-a-holism. I recall how we used to try to do everything perfect and "proficiently". Because the gm taught or trained by example (actually physically showed you what he was talking about) and not just lip-talk. Every single one of the employees loved if not liked this gm. As you may have guessed, corporate got wind of his excellency, and then swooped down to promote him to a corporate position. So now when I retrospect those times I see more and more how we really where a "dream team".
Cons
No in-store employee prep meetings to voice concerns and or share ideas! (Only time we get a prep meet is when a district or corporate employee drops by!) Untrained associates allowed literally to "undo" proper work that was already done! (I can understand correcting what a customer has disarrayed; but constantly having to correct what a fellow associate is screwing up is a wast of time and resources!) New cashiers are not trained beyond knowing how to ring-up a sale ( some won't even wipe up a spill by their own register or have to call a bagger off a lunch break...?!) Customer Service office Assistants need to learn how to efficiently manage the office and customer concerns, and not micro-manage their fellow employees to death while not even on the clock ! Management needs to open their eyes and fire any "lazy-leechers" that use up the "hours-quota" from the honest, competent, and hard workers. Only the baggers are told to clean the restrooms and empty register trash; but however, the the last time I checked, it's supposed to be a full rotation among the whole front end crew in cleaning the restrooms, and the break area. This seems to be so prevalent at all the Food Lion stores that I've worked, -that most front end employees don't even know that this is in the last written employee handbook (that everybody supposed to rotate cleaning the restrooms) . Required to constantly greet every customer any and everywhere even while pulling or pushing floats, pallets, and carts off the lot in the hot or cold weather conditions .