ARAMARK Employee Reviews for Retail Sales Associate

What do you like about working at ARAMARK?

"I worked for this company for right around 5 or 6 years and in that time I worked with a wide range of people. This gave me a wide range of development in retail sales and customer service, as well as working with and developing a great staff. There was a nice bit of freedom in our location, which made team building and supervisory development possible. Very challenging and rewarding if you love working with people."

Do you have any tips for others interviewing with this company?

"I would avoid this company unless you really want to be a hospitality field. Working in the various parks can be a huge amount of fun, but if my location speaks for any of the other places, the amount of work versus the pay and the the quality of company experience do not equal out. At the end of the day, I'd rather work for a company with a lot more integrity than what I've seen from ARAMARK."

What don't you like about working at ARAMARK?

"While I loved the job that I did, it was really despite ARAMARK and not because of them that we had such a fantastic and dedicated staff. The first problem was compensation. The company quite simply doesn't give much compensation to lower level employees beyond a free lunch and some discounts. Want a raise? They come annually, but at around a 3% figure, you aren't making much headway over inflation if you stay for years. That's another big problem. There is almost no commitment to company centered development of anyone other than managers. I knew around 120 different people in my 6 years there, and absolutely none of them were promoted into management positions in that time. All management were brought in from outside positions, which resulted in pretty high turnover and very low morale. Management also had high turnover. Equipment was old, unreliable, and almost never replaced. There was almost no real company structured culture."

What suggestions do you have for management?

"Improve training programs for new workers and invest more in development of hourly workers into management. Hire with more scrutiny rather than to just fill positions. I know the occasional bad hire slips in, but at my account it was prolific. Terrible profit margins, manager burnout, customer service issues, all could have been alleviated by one extra interview in the hiring process. The ARAMARK atmosphere I experienced is also entirely too separate between management and in the sales locations. This means very little opportunity for anything but micro managing by the management staff."