Walgreens Thinking about a Walgreens job, think twice! Fort CollinsFort Collins Colorado

It is unfortunate that you have had a bad experience with working at Walgreens as an MGT. I have been in that role for nearly a year now, and have worked for Walgreens for 2.5 years altogether.

Since becoming an MGT, typically I have been working about 3 closing shifts, 1 middle of the day shift, and 1 opening shift in a given week. I have never had issues with taking a weekend off if I know far enough in advance so that it doesn't create scheduling issues.

At my store, I encourage my employees to create personal connections with our customers. It is nice for employees to have customers smiling back at them, and from a business perspective, each company needs to have something unique to set itself apart from competitors. I try to ensure that at my Walgreens, excellent customer service is our "competitive advantage."

I find it difficult to believe that other MGTs or EXAs would sabotage your work, as I have never encountered anything remotely like that; if this indeed was the case, I apologize for your bad experience. It is important that we create a positive work environment for all employees...if employees don't want to be here, odds are the customer will know it.

Cheers,
-Chris in Portland

My experience is that upper management are only concerned about themselves. Its hard to believe that Greg Wasson and his cheerleader boy sidekick Mark Wagner are the best the executive search team could come up with. This management team is part of the problem, not part of the solution. They only care about shareholders and themselves. They cut everyone's pay but their own. I would advise against working as management at this company. All the posts are correct. Go to www.jobvent.com and type in walgreens (without the apostrophe between the n and the s, IE: walgreens). Amazing how unhappy employees are.

The District Manager was very arrogant! I wanted to tell him that this is only Walgreen's, and that it is maybe a 1/2 step up from McDonald's. This is not very important in the whole big picture! Having worked as MGT at 8 stores I can say that all but one of the store managers was extremely lazy. I also got the same pay/reviews as other MGT that read magazines, talk on the phone, and went out to smoke several times during their shift. Walgreen's needs to realize that just because you have a RX degree does not mean you know ANYTHING about management or running a store! Also the loss prevention people are bottom feeders and quite useless! The hours that were cut have killed the stores! Do they think the shelves will stock themselves? Retail jobs are not made fun of and put at the bottom of the job hierarchy because they are good jobs. This I understand! My favorite is when the management interns would say "I did not go to school and get in debt thousands of dollars in student loans so I could unload trucks and stock shelves for $14.75 per hour". They would then walk off the job or not return from lunch. You need no college for retail management! . Most people don't say they want to work retail when they grow up! Most of my co-workers were good hardworking people. It seems that the people from store manager on up are the dumb ones. There is still a lot of dead(store manager on up)weight to get rid of. Lots of good EXA's never going to get promoted as nothing is done about the extremely lazy store managers. We would say they were "coffee cup" managers as they would stay in the office all day. This was that way at 7 of the 8 stores I was at! There are a lot of useless jobs-all the ad tags/mega saver/easy saver tags BS! There would be 3-4 ad tags on the same product. We were also "shuffling s**t on the shelves" all the time. I looked at all the moving and moving again of merchandise as like re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic! which is to say a complete waste of time. I say" Set it and forget it". A lot of what we got in was JUNK! You can't polish a turd!

I worked for Walgreens for a while, training as a SIMs Coordinator.
I would also have to agree that the goals are near to outrageous and the management I dealt with was none-too-friendly.
I was trained for three days to replace the SIMs Coordinator for a week while she went on a vacation. This three days was a skim through on receiving, scan outs, and price updates. I supposedly didn't do the signing right on receiving and I only knew this because a fellow co-worker overheard management complaining. Instead of simply addressing the problem themselves, they chose to gossip.
Aside from the SIMs work, I also cashiered and stocked during my 10-hr night shift. I found it extremely difficult to attempt to cashier, get the shelves stocked, and then finish the weekly scan-outs for the entire store in 10 hours with an assistant manager who also had a list of tasks to complete.

While Walgreens does have some great benefits, there aren't a lot of positive points in the way of employee treatment.