Pros
The benefits are amazing. After my 5 yr mark, I accrued 5 weeks of vacation a year. In addition to the vaca time, I had flex holiday, sick, and personal and they all carried over from year to year. The healthcare is unbelievably cheap for a full-time single person at $24/mo, dental at $8/mo and vision is free. Many people work there just for the benefits. It is a great place to work as a part-time job. The benefits are really great for PT's too and anything over 32 hrs/wk. is considered full time. (aka full time benefits over 32hrs/wk.) Kitchens makes more money per hour than most other areas of the store (as a regular co-worker, not as a manager of course). I made 16.87/hr there. When I came from a department in the marketplace, I was making 11.00/hr after 3 yrs. My boyfriend currently works there and makes only 10/hr. after 2 1/2 yrs and only works 32 hrs a week when he wants 40 hours. He has to pick up hours ringing as a cashier frequently.
Cons
The management is all over the place. A manager's turnover rate is very high and they can either make or break a department. The store management (the big bosses) is very poor as well and got a very low score in regards to employees having faith in them as leaders last year at our VOICE survey (co-workers rate the company in different aspects). They also took away many positions throughout the company, leaving nowhere for current co-workers to advance which made many irritated. Another reason many are irritated there is that they tend to hire from outside a lot (even when there are not that many positions available for regular co-workers to advance) instead of taking a current co-worker for the job who wants it. They ALWAYS have temps.... so they can pay them less than regular co-workers. Regular co-workers NEVER get their 40 hrs either (but yet they still have temps). I had 32 hrs/wk. for over two years in the marketplace when I wanted to work 40 hrs. The co-workers are pretty tight-knit. That's what kept me for over 6 yrs. Some really great co-workers. Only the newbs "like" their job and our "excited" about it though. Everyone else knows better. They slowly took the "kitchen specialist" title away (they do this sort of thing in many departments as well), and changed it to "kitchen planner", then "kitchen seller". This means they don't have to pay as much as they would a "kitchen designer". My mother is a kitchen designer at a competitor and makes $26/hr plus commiss. No commission at IKEA in any dept. and much less money than a kitchen designer. We were a very high volume department averaging 14 kitchen sales per day and that's how they treat their co-workers. They also believe that the customer can design their own kitchen on the software..... which is crap. We still had to do it for them.