Pros
*Decent discount *if you like crafts, it's heaven *customer base is usually pretty friendly (it's hard to get angry about crafts) *The CEO is a good person and has done a lot of really great things. I'm not a fan of his company, (concept is fabulous, tho) but he himself is a great person. *closed on Sundays, some holidays.
Cons
My cons list is biased to the managing of the home accents section, because that was my 'main' job. Also, our store was twice the size of 'normal' HL stores, so 'running around the store' was quite a feat! *extremely disorganized: part of this is due to the ancient computer system. Any ordering of product is done by hand. There are no scanners for cashier-ing. I can't even imagine how easy it is to steal from HL. I was randomly thrown into home accents, and there was no rhyme or reason to the way the shelves were organized according to the ordering booklet. This may differ by location. *Poor management and communication: I'm sure all Hobby Lobby stores are not equal, but we had horrible management. If you have good, solid managers who are willing to communicate with everyone equally, then you've found a super location, and I would recommend working there. The management that I was under played favorites to the extreme, and were somewhat sexist in job placement. Communication was even worse--you had to make friends with the other employees in order to find out what policies had changed. Sometimes there were meetings before work, and sometimes there weren't--I was never told about any of them, whether they happened every day, on a weekly basis--and this was after asking management. *Unrealistic expectations: HL was expected to be your life. At my location, you would get in trouble if you were helping a customer and you were called to cashier. *poor training: There is no training/guideline on how to handle customers. I came from a 'just say yes' company to HL where you often had to say No and be quite firm about it. There was no training on how to do this (yes, it's not rocket science, but it's important to have the training in place-- especially for those without customer service experience). It's just 'be nice.' Well, that's as clear as mud! ;) *zero positive reinforcement: This may not be a big deal to some, but having been in management previously in a setting with difficult customers, it can be vital for job satisfaction! I was not told a single time that I was doing well with anything. I still have no idea whether I was doing a good job or not. *favoritism: At my location, favoritism was to the extreme--I would give examples, but they are distinct to my location. Basically--some people could get away with anything, and others would get in trouble for things that weren't even their fault. One situation: I got in trouble for discarding broken objects that weren't going to sell. Unfortunately, I was not one of the well-liked--which is odd because I was previously friends with some of the management! ;) I know a lot of these situations are biased, but if the rest of the stores are like this, I can see why so many others dislike their jobs.