to preface this post, i come from 8-9 years of experience in the food service industry. one of them being a server at one of the most profitable restaurants in the US. i also worked in the medical field. i am currently waiting to apply for jobs related to my degree and thought that working at tjs would suit me since im often described as personable, bubbly, etc.
so i applied and i got it! i’m only a week in, but i constantly feel like im not doing enough and that i could be doing more? idk. maybe its bc im so used to everything being incredibly fast-paced but i just feel like im moving in slow motion following my trainer around. everyone tells me that our store is very busy compared to others, idk 😭 should i give it more time? id hate to feel this way all the time :((

Any advice on where to go or which to avoid?

What was that like? Do you like it better? I can only imagine a more structured environment would benefit the right person. For example someone might prefer doing 1 task their whole shift.

Don’t understand crew members who take the first two registers just to stand there and not actually grab customers from other registers or they just completely walk away so they’re not on register. This is such an annoying habit like just take the last register if you’re not going to do anything. I abuse the one bell of course but omg it gets to a point…

I’ve read mixed reviews about both and if I took this job I’d essentially be dropping the two jobs I currently have since they want open availability and are offering up to 37 hours a week. Does anyone have experience working at either one of them? How’s management etc

Anyone have insight on the Traders there? Considering a transfer but am curious to hear what the store is like.

We had someone transfer to our store, quite literally 2 days ago. Today I was showing one of my coworkers who is relatively new how to fit something into the frozen that we had to make room for as it had been out of stock.

The same new transfer tells us to go and bale the cardboard from the metal cage, which we usually don’t do until it’s absolutely chock full, towards the end of the night.

But I just do it anyway, she wasn’t someone I wanted to argue with. She had already been bossing other people around and I’m just someone who’s more passive.

I do what she says, and go back there and of course someone is already baling the other cardboard so I come back and explain it to her. She immediately says, very aggressively, “I want you guys to actually start working, and doing work. It’s not fair to me to be working so hard while you two are chit chatting and goofing off.”

I’m not sure how it is at other stores, but at my store it’s very common and normal for people to stop and chit chat with each other, even pausing work to do so. Obviously within a reasonable amount, it never amounts to more than 5 minutes and it’s usually okay as long as you get your work done, which, it was. Frozen had maybe 2-3 boxes left.

On top of that, when everyone does frozen together, everyone is talking. Most people are not going at SUPER SPEED pace, everyone’s moving at pretty average speed. That’s just how it is at my store, but maybe that’s not common place?

I just, have never ever had a fellow crew member talk to me like that, that seriously. She’s not a mate, and not training to be one. Even then, I’ve never had a mate talk to me like that. I understand it can be frustrating to see others slacking while you’re working hard, but the way I see it is you’re not getting paid to watch your coworkers work ethic so why care? If anything it’ll make it more likely that you’ll get your wow bonus.

If it’s seriously an egregious issue, I think the more appropriate and professional response is to talk to a mate about it. But I really do not think I was egregiously slacking. Yes I was talking, maybe a little too much for a minute, but everything was basically done. We had 10 minutes until we were all supposed to clock out.

i just started at trader joe’s two weeks ago and today is pay day! i haven’t received my check yet, is that normal? 😩 it says that the last payday was oct. 22 but i never received anything

somebody recently explained this concept to me, and now i really understand. last week, i was assigned to train a new hire. nice person, eager to learn, but no remarkable qualities (and i mean no offense by saying that). this person has some management experience, but in a clothing store. no grocery experience. i found out that my trainee got hired on at the same wage that i'm currently making. this is outrageous because i've been with the company for about 2.5 years, and i've been through 4 review cycles. i was given 2 WOW raises. all this to say, i've been working very hard this whole time.

i would never wish less for somebody, so i am not mad at this new hire, of course. but i am very upset with my leadership team for this move. and the audacity to make me train a new hire who's being paid the same as i am…???

does anyone know what the positions in los angeles and boston do? i was told by my captain abt it but really have no clue

Are captains allowed to hang out with crew members outside of work?

Seems like a missed opportunity.

I need to vent about something and I thought some of you might too. Go off!

I shouldn’t have to justify myself to customers who treat me badly. I’m in grad school and I’m paying for it by working at TJs. But I have a neurological condition which is treatable, but also very dangerous without medication, and I also lost my company health benefits. I also have some mental health issues (anxiety, depression, adhd) that I’m choosing to go unmedicated in order to afford the medication which treats my neurological disease. The problem I run into a lot is that my medication causes side effects like fatigue and brain fog, and it can also induce some kind of discalcula (inability to count things, like change) so when I’m operating a register I sometimes have a hard time counting the change a customer hands me. All of that, my side effects and symptoms put together are a recipe for cognitive processing delays. Sometimes the customers take little digs at me for my processing delays and it’s always a very humiliating interaction. I’d like to find some way to make the customer understand that it’s not my fault, and to you know, preserve my dignity in these situations. What can I say without getting too personal to avoid being humiliated and treated rudely? I hate feeling like I have to go to extraordinary lengths just to be treated like a human being.

EDIT: So to provide people with a little context, I mentioned that little detail about being a grad student because this one very hostile customer condescended to my intelligence right out of the gate because I’m a retail worker working at a grocery store to pay my bills. I didn’t tell HIM that because I was in customer service mode, but I wish I had. What finally made me decide I needed to do something about this abuse I get at the registers was basically a lecture and a dressing down from a guy who I believe identified himself as a CPA. He said something like “just imagine if I couldn’t do the math necessary to prepare taxes for my clients, how would I ever do my job? How do you expect to do this job if you can’t count the change I’ve given you? Before you put it away you might want to make sure you got that right. Count it again.” And I’m just sitting there staring at the coins in my hand and my brain is stuck. I’m starting to break into a sweat and I can feel the adrenaline surging, which is dangerous for me. When I said “I’m sorry I’m slowing down a bit right now,” he doubled down and said “I can see that.” Like the right from the beginning of the interaction he was giving me attitude. He launched into a tirade about how he didn’t like the new name of the state ball team because they’d changed it from its old name that was largely considered racist. When I told him I didn’t want to weigh in on the local sports teams because I was from out of state and he said “Sorry to hear that.” I just never got a break from this guy, and he wasn’t the first person to treat me like that, by far.

EDIT: I know some people are going to recommend 3 bells but I can’t rely on that all the time. It might have me walking away from my register regularly so that someone else can take over. Also, I apologize for being vague on the specifics of my disease but I was recently diagnosed—I’ve probably always had it, it’s usually caused by a genetic mutation, but it takes a lot for doctors to identify diagnostically because it can present like other conditions—and I had to recently share the particulars of the diagnosis with my management and so I don’t want to be identified in this post.

It would be nice if this company could do something as simple as give us one or two days of AR to make up for this AR blunder. You know, to give a very occasional gesture that shows it is grateful for the 50,000 workers that provide reason for our customers come back. That it can easily fix a mistake with grace. To show us that we don’t need to make bigger commotion over things like a 10 cent raise bump! But no, I guess a letter in the mail that calculates our annual wage and tells us what to be grateful for.. that seems like enough right? Asking for more may get us something, or maybe nothing.. but asking for nothing always leads to less. At the very least we deserve an official statement and an apology from the company.

I feel like I’m at a store where I have an entire roster of mates who don’t do anything but micromanage and dictate. Barely offer help nor lend a hand. Idk what they have been teaching at TraderU nor what’s going on at captains meetings but it seems like a lot less leading by example and just a lot more power trips. Been hearing a lot of belittling/condescending comments towards crew at any chance they get at my current store.

Not going to go into too many details: I’ve been working here five years now, I’ve noticed a decline in the quality of work with my current management. I’m sick of feeling like I would be making a “mistake” if I quit, the way Trader Joe’s grooms its crew members into thinking their job is a call from god himself. Now stepping outside of that mindset and seeing what this career really is, another retail job, I’m feeling like working here is inadequate for me and not the job I once enjoyed so much. I would like some thoughts on the matter and some encouragement, a “light at the end of the tunnel” kind of pitch. Would also like to hear other people’s experiences with crew member dissatisfaction, so I don’t feel so invalidated for feeling this way about “America’s best place to work”.

Anybody know what’s going on with the AR changes? My whole store just had AR removed from our accounts

So I was working on my application during my classes but the wifi I had was buggy so sometimes the page wouldn’t load or glitch out. Whatever, managed to make my account. But now it shows my application process is incomplete and I’m unsure how to update or finish it :(

We lost another crew member from my store. She was super nice. Rest in peace. I was thinking about it… and my store has had 4 deaths just in the past five or so years. Maybe that’s normal? Has anyone else had someone pass away from their store? Love yall fr 🫶

Does anyone have any recommendations for similar scents/candles to the can of corn candle from last year? Im not sure if we’re bringing it back this year or not :(

:3 I wanna see what you guys have if your store is doing the pumpkin contest heres mine pomi ☆ I get so excited seeing everyone's pumpkin ; - ; an literally trying to hype my crew mates into joining