Fastenal – “Great for beginners...”

Pros

Good pay / opportunities for anyone with no skills or experience that can impress someone in an interview with "yes man" qualities.

New company trucks for the branch every 1-2 years. Local managers allowed to run their own show (with limits, of course) as long as their sales / growth numbers are good.

Lots of freedom as far as vacation, personal time, and even small chores through the day if necessary like going to the bank or returning a rented movie.

You can learn a ton about distribution business if you're just beginning your career, because your responsibilities cover pretty much every aspect of the business.

No drug tests, even after having a wreck in a company vehicle.

If you're smart, use Fastenal to learn the business, and build relationships with every customer you can. If you're lucky, one of those customers will hire you before you get broke working for Fastenal.

Cons

Make some money for a while, then you absolutely must must must grow sales in order to even maintain your take home pay. I truly believe the whole system is set up to build a new employee up for about 2-3 years, then pay them less from there on out so they'll move on and let someone younger, less skilled, and less experienced take over. Unless you want to move to Kalamazoo or Utah or something like that.

Great distribtion network is well planned but not well executed. Product is late, missing, lost , stolen, damaged, donated, sold, pawned, broken, used, or just plain wrong on a daily basis, making three times the work for branch employees.

Stores are thinly staffed.

Anything above a full-time support employee will work 50 hours, at least. At least.

Company descisions are made for the sole purpose of keeping stockholders happy, no exceptions. Good example is keeping low inventory levels. This means that about half the stuff in the Fastenal catalog is not in the distribution centers, causing long lead times for customers, and a disadvantage for the fastenal employee selling the product.

Extremely tight with expenses. Also operates on unusually high margins making new business and business that is less service oriented harder to get.

Advice to Senior Management

You know all the "big" customers you wish you had more business with? These typs of accounts take years to earn trust and respect. This mean when they call twice a year for their emergency need, they talk to the same person every year. So maybe you should make more of an effort to retain your more veteran employees in their current positions, instead of only giving them opportunities that are abroad rather than local.