Walgreens Reviews in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN Area

Pros

Walgreens cares about their employees and pays every employee well. Raises are given once a year to everyone, regardless of how sales were. If other stores are short on available employees, they may ask other stores if their employees are interested in gaining more hours. There is room to move around and for advancement within stores and corporate. Benefits are available after working with the company for 6 months. Everyone working at Walgreens treats one another with respect.

Cons

A variety of customers come into Walgreens every day. Some can be very creepy and stalker-like towards certain employees. There are also some customers who come in angry and will also leave angry and take it out on the employees. Kiosks in the photo department shut down periodically, causing less customers coming in to order digital prints.

Advice to Senior Management

0

Pros

Messing with the customers is fun and time goes by fast. Co workers are appreciative and supportive. Good benefits and ok pay for retail.

Cons

Multitasking takes on a whole new meaning in Pharmacy. Try taking customers prescriptions, making sure they are in the computer and all info up-to-date, typing those prescriptions, troubleshooting insurance problems from 100's of different cards, AND answering the CONSTANTLY RINGING telephone ALL AT THE SAME TIME- LITERALLY! -while you have a line of customers n front of you. You cannot accomplish one single task before another is thrown in front of you.

Advice to Senior Management

Front end managers are suppose to come back and help the pharmacy when we are busy. Corporate knows we are under staffed and delegated the extra slack to the front end managers. Get back and help us without us consistently having to ask. Its obvious when we are busy.

Pros

flexible hours since most stores are open at 24 hours, but that includes being willing to work in multiple departments

Cons

worked in pharmacy and usually customers were incredible rude given the location of the store I primarily worked at. incompetent manager at beginning of employment.

Advice to Senior Management

worked in pharmacy and usually customers were incredible rude given the location of the store I primarily worked at. incompetent manager at beginning of employment.

Pros

-decent pay. started at 8 and got a quarter raise every 6 months automatically
-you get close to your co-workers, everyone gets along well
-fun working with cosmetics
-nice managers

Cons

-sometimes there's just nothing to do, and you get yelled at for that
-sometimes things are very face-paced. have to ring up a ton of customers or have to empty a bunch of totes or boxes of products
-gets boring

Pros

Leadership opportunites exist if you have desire to do so. Great career if you are looking to stay in retail. Teaches you about yourself and who you are and where you want to be. Co-workers become like family because of time spent working together and smaller establishment causing you to be side by side most of the time.

Cons

Terrible hours but thats retail. People ahead of you may not be ready for their position or qualified. Have to put up with a lot of hastey customers, again thats retail.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees and go to the store level for oppinions and ideas. Ask for more input from employees throughout company, many great ideas may go to waste if they aren't shared.

Pros

Walgreens offers a good stepping stone for those coming out of college that need assistant manager experience. In a lot of cases, people will use Walgreens to land other jobs.

The pay is decent when compared to other entry level jobs, and it's hourly, so you get paid for every hour you work.

Benefits are decent. Walgreens offers health insurance, dental insurance, and discounts on eyecare. They also give their employees 15% off name brand merchandise and 20% off Walgreens brand, and discounts on prescriptions ($5 for 30 days, $12 for 90 days).

Walgreens is a pretty small store, so there aren't a lot of employees to oversee, and you get a lot of the same customers in every day.

Cons

Walgreens has changed a lot, including cutting hours. The main drawback of being an MGT at Walgreens is the amount of physical labor. You can get paid better at another retailer and not do any of the physical labor that you will do at Walgreens. As an MGT, in most stores you will only have 3 other employees working with you, and they have their own things to do, which means that as MGT, you're doing everything yourself, including stocking shelves, building displays, and even cleaning bathrooms. If the store manager delegates it to you, you're probably going to do it yourself.

Managers at Walgreens handle all the returns, count every drawer, and deal with every customer service issue (and there's a lot now that there's no hours).

Pharmacy has suffered hour cutbacks as well, and because of that, you'll spend most of your night in pharmacy, and won't have time to get anything else done, let alone count the drawers at the end of the night. And, you'll get yelled at by your boss the next day.

Walgreens has even started eliminating MGT positions, replacing them with a cheaper STL option (keyholder who gets $10/hr). This person is supposed to close once a week, eliminating the need for the MGT to close every night, but in most cases, STL won't close, only working days Monday-Friday. That leaves the MGT to close the store and work most weekends.

Walgreens NEVER closes. Literally. It's open when everything else is closed. Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day. I've worked at stores that have stayed open LATER on Christmas Eve and 4th of July and opened EARLIER on Black Friday. Doesn't leave much time for family. In non-24 hour stores, pharmacy is only open 9-5 on most holidays, and closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of your people. If it wasn't for them, you wouldn't have your profits. You've taken away so much from employees at the store level, and you've really crapped on MGTs. Stop asking us to do more with less, and make your goals attainable with the hours that we have now.

Pros

The pay is among the best in the country. I have yet to find a job that is anywhere near the rate of Walgreens.
Great work environment, smaller store makes helping customers easy!
Benefits are decent, lots of vacation time!

Cons

Walgreens is changing everything!!! Very unstable right now.

Promotions are given based on favoritism. If management "doesn't know you" you won't get promoted to higher positions. (aka brown nose)

Absolutely NO OT!! (This used to be a perk of the job!)

Advice to Senior Management

Decide what is going on with reogranization. Too many surprise changes.

Stop breaking promises. Don't tell us that you're not changing the way you run stores, and then change the way you run stores.

I do like the Customer Centric Retailing plan that is coming!!! should be great!! Think customers will be able to tell difference between Walgreens and CVS?

Pros

Variety of different tasks, boredom seldom a problem. Decent benefit package especially the usual 3 to 1 profit sharing company match. Reasonable pay for the generally menial tasks required of the low level store management team.

Cons

Completion of tasks becoming more difficult in recent months due to severe cuts in store level payroll. 15% cut in assistant manager pay due to 4 hours of OT per week taken away leaving the EXA's having to work more hours with no extra pay.

Advice to Senior Management

Remember the foundation on which the company ran successfully for the previous 107 years which is take care of your people and they will then take care of the customers.

Pros

It is a good job to start after college. They will hire you as an assistant manager as long as you have a 4yr degree, doesn't matter if its not a business degree. Walgreens are near the top in the country in hiring from college. They offer a good profit sharing plan. It is a pretty easy job, most of the work that you do is stock shelves and count cash drawers. There is good pay once you get to store management level with yearly bonuses.

Cons

Training and development depends on who your store manager is and so does how you get promoted, its all about who you know and less how hard of a worker you are. It is retail so you will be working weekends, nights, and holidays. In my district the only shifts available to work are 11-7 or 2-10:30, so it does leave much time to spend with your family or friends. Recently there have been a lot of changes at Walgreens due to the economy and they took overtime away from assistant managers which ended up being about a 15% pay cut. There is not a lot of communication between corporate/district offices to the store level.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your stores and learn what works and doesn't. What sounds good in theory or on paper doesn't always mean it will be succesful at the store level.

Pros

Their computer system is designed for pharmacists - they spend a lot of money programming it to be smooth and effiecient. Adequately trained Senior Technicians can help out immensely. In the MN district you are allowed to implement initiatives of interest. Additionally, there are specialty pharmacies for HIV/AIDs, Compounding etc.

Cons

The script fill can be very high. At times it would be nice if store managers were willing to help more in the pharmacy considering the pharmacy is the main profit maker.

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage the store to help the pharmacy. They should not be considered a completely solo entity - but rather an important component of the store.