The very first thing they asked me after the universal "So, tell me about yourself..." was how much I wanted to make per hour. I was caught a bit off-guard, since I am used to this question being asked towards the end of an interview rather than the very beginning.
I told them I was completely open to negotiation, and asked them for the position's pay range. They said they couldn't provide that information. So I said that I had checked glassdoor.com, with the range given as $10-$15 and with an average of $12. I told the interviewer that I would therefore like to start the negotiation at $12 (given my experience and qualifications I did not want to look lacking in confidence by groveling for the very minimum pay, but I also didn't want to look greedy), but that I was fully willing to go lower than that if necessary.
The interviewer nodded and scribbled something down, asked me a very small number of rather curt questions, seemed completely disinterested in anything I had to say and ushered me out. I got an email in almost record time informing me that I was no longer in the running for the position.
I was called back a while later to interview for a lower clerk position, and the first thing the (different) interviewer told me was that I was automatically disqualified from the Assistant Manager position because the first interviewer wrote down that I had DEMANDED absolutely no less than $12 an hour, and that that was more than their maximum pay range for the position. When I explained that I had tried to ask for that specific store's pay range and was denied, and that glassdoor.com's posted pay range was the *only* thing I actually had to estimate from, I was admonished that glassdoor.com's statistics are skewed because the pay ranges differ by state, and that I shouldn't be going to a third party to get information on their company.
All in all, I felt it was a very convoluted, disrespectful, unfair and borderline hostile experience, and in hindsight, I am very, VERY glad they didn't hire me. I ended up getting a job at one of their main competitors, where I get paid a lot more, treated very kindly and fairly, *and* it's a company that has *much* higher ratings on glassdoor.com than The Fresh Market does! So I really can't complain, though I urge everybody to look at just how low this company's overall scores are on glassdoor.com compared to other grocery stores, and apply at your own risk......
