Peet's Reviews

Pros

They really care about coffee and tea, and value sharing that knowledge with their employees. Access to some of the very best coffees and teas available in a store. Dynamic environment coupled with discerning clientele.

Cons

Some shifts can burn you out, particularly the weekends. Pay is competitive within the industry, but will still having you living paycheck to paycheck.

Advice to Senior Management

Find way to return focus on exclusive quality instead of yielding to puerile market demands. Employees used to have more pride for working at Peet's, but that has waned in recent years. Management needs to kickback more against unreasonable customer desires which increase profits, but lower company quality and integrity.

Pros

I love the people I worked with and still keep in touch with a bunch of them
Peet's has amazing coffee, tea and other products
The culture around coffee and tea was fun and engaging

Cons

Peet's has amazing coffee and tea, and very loyal customers. It's sales manage to hide a lot of problems with the corporate leadership team.
When I was there, most every management person at Peet's was spending most of their time doing work at least a level below their job title. Which leaves one to wonder, who was doing the long-term strategy and planning work execs and directors should be doing?
It wasn't unusual for execs to wait until the rollout of major projects to really pay attention and then come along and change important aspects that had already been signed off by the leader who should have the authority!
Many leaders at Peet's are poor role models... do as I say, not as I do.
There are and have been several folks at the exec/director level who are/were known by just about everyone to be ineffective and/or counterproductive in their roles. No one had the nerve to let them go. In fact, many of those execs/directors stayed until THEY were ready to leave. And, in fact, several have managed to move on to similar or better positions with Peet's own vendors and partners!
In the end, I left because I was working on project after project that had unrealistic deadlines, didn't have enough early buy-in/support from the executive and/or leadership teams, were poorly resourced, kept getting postponed and when they finally did roll out weren't as effective as they could have been.
You'd work your tail end off, deliver what was asked of you and folks would only notice what was wrong.
I'd blame myself and often did when I worked there, but I am doing similar work at another company: I have proper funding for my projects, support from my VP, I'm crazy productive here and considered a top performer...
Lots of great career lessons learned at Peet's, but I could have saved myself a lot of stress by leaving sooner.

Advice to Senior Management

Do a better job on hiring and promotion decisions for your leadership roles. And when you do actually make a good hire, get out of that person's way and let them succeed! Hold people accountable in a fair and consistent manner.

Pros

Gold standard emphasis. New information given promptly. Not stressful or demanding. Schedule availability extremely flexible. Free products weekly. Great tips.

Cons

Paltry hours. Fixed position (perform other assigned duties when slow). Barista training takes months if not persistent. Raises occur yearly.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure overall training is complete by 2 months max! Proper equal treatment of employees by managers should be checked.

Pros

decent health insurance, but it is costly. learn to make decent espresso drinks.

Cons

weak management. looking always towards $$ made in store. Always cutting back on services to customers to make more money. High turnover in employees. Have had 4 managers in 3 1/2 years, and am about to get another one. Very low increase in hourly wage. My store was very dirty. Manager did not seem to care unless district manager made comments.

Advice to Senior Management

Choose better more qualified managers for districts and stores who care about customers and employees. Having managers and district managers work in one of the stores as a barista, where for a minimum of 1 month, would give them a better idea on how the store should run. Always pushing to make more money but cutting back on service to customer is not right. Always pushing for speed in service rather than quality of products is ridiculous. Cutting back on staff to save money is wrong. You cannot have a quality product if the store is understaffed. Also the "secret shopper" is ridiculous. Shouldn't all customers be treated as a secret shopper??? Also scheduling staff to close and open the next day is ridiculous. I believe there is a California law requiring a minimum of 8 hours between shifts.

Pros

great benefits and you can take coffee home every week.

Cons

opens too early eventhough there are no customers for the first hour.

Advice to Senior Management

n/a

Pros

Good work life balance
Good coffee

Cons

No accountability
Firefighting is rewarded instead of root cause closure
Lack of direction from mid-level management
Communication seems to be on a "need to know" basis (usually after the fact)
Seem content with "maintaining" the company instead of growing

Advice to Senior Management

Put a strategy together and work as a team
Use the proper escalation and role guidelines your L&D group developed
Consider leveraging your systems to grow instead of maintain

Pros

You get paid a decent wage for a low skill management position.

Cons

Hard work 8 hours a day trying to balance the needs of your employees with corporate changes and rules.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase pay to shift leaders and focus more on training and less on speed of service.

Pros

The people are very nice and engaging; there is work to be done, and we want to do it.

Cons

Pay not as competitive for the marketplace.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay your people competitively; keep listening; expand retail presense to support Grocery.

Pros

Their hours are flexible, which is perfect if you are a student. The benefits are good and the tips generated during the week is okay considering it's about 2 bucks per hour you work, that's like a tank of gas or play money for the week. And who doesn't want unlimited amounts of coffee and tea during their shift?

Cons

Management can suck, and as in any other workplace, you won't always get along with who you work with. Plus be prepared to deal with a lot of dirty work being that it is a coffee shop.

Pros

The coffee and tea are fantastic.

Cons

Delivering on time was always more important than quality.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to take a more holistic approach to projects and new initiatives.