Wegmans Food Markets reviews

My biggest advice to anyone who works at Wegmans is to work in a department where you will be working directly with your department manager. Many departments such as Dairy, Frozen Foods, Nature's Marketplace, Bulk Foods and others are run by the Team Leader and not the Department Manager. Each of these small departments fall under the jurisdiction of a larger one and this is where things get tricky. For example. If you work in dairy, you rarely, if ever work with the grocery manager, but he is the one who does your review. How does he do your review if he doesn't work with you? He bases his judgements solely on the comments of the Team Leader. This gives Team Leaders in smaller departments a dangerous amount of power. Because they are mostly unsupervised by department mangers or higher ups, many Team Leaders will deliberately sabotage any coworker they deem a threat. The department manager always sides with the Team Leader no matter what. Considering that most of these Team Leaders have little to no managerial training or skills, it is very foolish to always side with the Team Leader. So if you are going to work at Wegmans, make sure to work as a Cashier or departments such as Grocery, Produce, Bakery, Deli, Meat, Seafood or Cheese as you will actually be working directly with your department manager. Performance reviews will be far more accurate when your manager is working directly with you, instead of basing it on hearsay from the (often incompetent) Team Leader.

Where do I start: - Breaks and Lunches: I cannot believe that there is only a ten minute break for 4 hour shifts. When your a cashier standing all day, you definitely get tired. Of course, management is uptight about leaning on the registers "as they're not meant to be a leaning post." I'm glad that there is a law requiring companies to give employees a lunch break after a certain amount of time, because Wegman's can't have employees not working (even though lunches are off the clock). - Rules: Just plain stupid. Need a drink of water at 10:30 at night with almost no person in the store? Gonna have to ask your manager to get a quick drink. This wouldn't be a problem if employees were allowed to have drinks at their registers. They always make you "wipe down" your register to make it look clean, but if you look at the cracks and crevices of the machines, that is one dirty place. I have seen many bugs on multiple occasions hanging around the area. In the likely case you have downtime (and let me tell you, you will have a LOT of downtime), the only thing you can do is stand in front of your register and wait for customers. - Lower Management: Wow... absolutely astonishing. Favoritism anybody? First of all, while I understand their policy against cell phone usage, the team leaders for the front end rarely enforce it (I've seen multiple employees use phones out in the open when they have no customers around). Of course, the one time I check my phone, I get caught by an older senior manager who made way too big a deal about the incident. So be careful, they definitely have inconstant policies among lower and upper management. Although, most team leaders were nice and considerate. I feel bad for them because they are always running around. They also understand how horrible it is to work there, so they tend to be lenient towards most policies. But, then again, they always seem to chose favorites who are able to leave early from a shift or do other, not-as-mindless jobs. They also were the ones who got the promotions. - Upper Management: They weren't nice at all (see cell phone incident above). My Front End managers were always really angry if you took days off (even weeks in advance) and rarely got to know any of their employees. - Scheduling: Definitely not as advertised. Flexible scheduling? Only if you can request days off early enough before everyone else. Almost every weekend is filled up with time off requests (they only have 10-15 spots per day). Of course, because of this, they will more than likely call you and ask if you can come in and work because they are always understaffed on weekends. When I was hired, I specifically asked about not working Sundays (for religious reasons) and was told this was fine, but might have to work every once in a while. I was fine with that. Of course, that turned into every single Sunday, which is indeed the busiest day of the week. When you are promised one thing and then they break that promise, that's just bad scheduling. Honestly, it always seemed like they over scheduled me and my fellow employees when none of us wanted to work at that frequencies. They seemed unwilling and (maybe) unable to hire new cashiers to fill in the work that needed to be done. Even though I was available to work early afternoons and Saturday mornings, I was never scheduled to work then (because, being a teenager, they give these slots to the older cashiers). - Benefits: Haha.... yeah.... there aren't any if your a part-time employee. No vacation or anything. Only if you're lucky enough to get a full-time job, which they don't give out too often. - United Way: Look, charities are great. That's why I donate 10% of my pay check to my Church's humanitarian efforts. Yet, even with this, Wegman's nearly forces you to donate a part of your pay check to United Way. Even though the donation amount is very small, you have to put down an amount you will give IN FRONT OF YOUR MANAGER, because they assume that you will give to their charity of choice. I was not given an option of not donating to United Way and felt pressured into donating part of my paycheck every week. I'm not sure if they do this at all Wegman's, but it definitely happened at Warrington. Overall, if you got to the end of my rant, congratulations, you have finally learned the truth of Wegman's and why it truly doesn't deserve it's Fortune rating.