Vantaggi
Coffee is great, as are the barista training standards. Many/most of the floor-level and lower-level management and coworkers are really wonderful people. The flexibility of a family-owned company was nice sometimes It is possible to grow within the company, as long as they like you (more on that in the cons)
Svantaggi
Duplicitous upper management/ownership If you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, they will halt your development within the company and not be upfront about it. Upper management has a very specific image of people they think are a “culture fit” and have a weird obsession with trying to come off as “the Ritz Carlton of coffee,” which is just an absurd and antiquated thing to look for/expect out of service industry workers making a low wage. They expect absolute loyalty to the company over everything else while often not providing much incentive for this loyalty (unless they deem you “worthy” of promotions, etc.) A ton of nepotism and favoritism throughout all levels of the company. Very little regard for employees’ personal lives. They’ll pretend to care, but their actions indicate otherwise. I worked in St. Louis, but they seemed to be especially unsympathetic to any issues employees had in their other locations in KC, Atlanta, etc. Almost like they would forget about them and because they weren’t physically in front of them, they weren’t able to pretend to care as much because they didn’t have to face those folks as often. Higher-level leadership is completely unwilling to accept feedback, ideas, etc. from floor-level workers and always think they know best. This would be tolerable if they didn’t ask for feedback and ideas, only to immediately shut it down.