Pros
The benefits are outstanding. The culture is what you and your coworkers make of it. The relationships you can build are fantastic, with both customers and coworkers. When things are good, they are good. Howard Shultz is a great company leader. This is a great company if you're not hoping to build a career beyond the SM role - the stability is there and you have the flexibility to move anywhere in the country and transfer, that's huge.
Cons
As a store manager its hard to capture all of the cons, most significant is that you aren't really a manager of anything, you are a barista 95% of the time. Managing amounts to scheduling, ordering, interviewing, writing and executing reviews, attending district meetings, having to sit with your DM on store visits and training, and because the expectation is that you are a barista for 36 hours a week you work far more than 50 hours, unless you learn to manipulate your labor which a lot of folks do. Looking at the average salary of the SM position and calculating your hourly rate is disheartening. In retail it's pretty common to change retail sets regularly, Sbux does it every 6 to 9 weeks and because of the labor model it's typically the SM doing it after their shift. With every retail set comes crazy goals for selling different beverages and coffee - this is asinine when you take into account that most regular customers get the same thing every day. The gossip is impressive, and I don't mean in a good way. District managers in the Dallas area are amazingly susceptible to engaging in this gossip - it would be comical if it weren't just sad. The starting pay for baristas is embarrassingly low, and tops out at 10.00, trying to attract good people and keep turnover low when you have to offer 7.50 an hour to start is difficult. There is rarely (and I mean like winning the lottery rare) any real promotion opportunity beyond SM, and forget about trying to pursue a path outside of operations, it doesn't happen, seriously I saw it happen 2 times in more than 12 years. Increasingly you have middle and upper levels of management that are not "Starbucks" people (promoting out of the store isn't happening), so the culture is shifting rapidly and not in a good way. It used to be about the people first, now its become just another retailer chasing the numbers carrot, and that's sad. What made Sbux different was that it didn't fall into the numbers trap. Back in the day it was known that the numbers come if you put the people first (and not the customers above the partners), why that has changed I don't understand because it wasn't broken.