Pros
Great experience with sales, product knowledge, working with regular customers/contractors, coworkers tend to be cool
Cons
The company asks too much of their employees and doesn't hire enough people to execute those tasks. As a sales associate, I was expected to not only sell product, understand what each product should be used on, and stock/face shelves. I was also expected to unload freight, organize the warehouse with the forklift, put freight away, tint paint, give color consultation, do lead generation calls, take deliveries, pick up product from other stores, and anything else that came up in the day. If a manager wasn't in the store it landed on me (or whoever was the most experienced in the store) to handle the situation. My biggest complaint was with corporate and a lot of what happened while I was there didn't directly impact me, but I saw what it did to the management and other employees within the store. Store managers are paid salary, but they're expected to work as much as they possibly can. This led to them working 12-13 hour days at least 5 days a week, but sometimes they would also come in on the weekends. They are overworked and underpaid. If you do the math, they're really making under minimum wage with how many hours they work and with the fact that they don't get overtime. Assistant managers do get paid overtime, but not every assistant wants to do that. My former assistant was one of those who didn't want to work overtime as it isn't a requirement, by law, and he had a life. When corporate asked why he can't work overtime and my store manager explained that he's working as much he wants to, corporate's response was 'Well, what's he working for our company for if he isn't willing to work as much as he can for us?' This response to me was unacceptable and one of the reasons that I left Sherwin Williams after 3 years. Part of what led to this was that they watch how much their part-timers are working. If you average over 28 hours a week, they will cut your hours to average you out so they don't have to give you benefits. I was fortunate in that my hours never got cut in the 3 years that I was with Sherwin, but I saw this happen multiple times to many different coworkers of mine. In the last month that I was with Sherwin, one of my coworkers got cut to 3 hours a week. How can you live off of that? He ended up taking unemployment (which Sherwin got mad about because that hurts them financially in some way) and my store manager gave him at least $500 out of her own pocket so that he wouldn't quit. We were understaffed in my last month with Sherwin. One coworker was cut to 3 hours a week, two others worked full time jobs and only worked about 1-2 days a week and along the way my assistant left the company. That left me, my store manager and two other coworkers. The other two coworkers had to watch their hours so they didn't get cut. I knew I would be leaving throughout this so I didn't worry about it. My store manager also was having medical issues where she was having cataplexy (a form of seizures) in front of customers. She talked to her doctor and he was going to put her on medical leave. The doctor forgot to put an effective date on the note, he just dated the note as the day he wrote it. I assume that that meant that she was to go on leave immediately. Sherwin took advantage of that and asked my manager to stay with the company for 2 weeks so they could figure out what they were going to do staffing wise given that she was going on leave, my assistant two weeks later would be leaving and I would also be leaving. My store manager's last day and my last day were the same day. Sherwin still had not figured out who was going to come into the store to work. This company is unorganized. I could go on, as I didn't even mention that their freight trucks are never on time, we always run out of product, I had a manager from another store that I worked at yell at me because he was being overworked and I couldn't come into a shift that he had scheduled me, they don't require their employees to take lunch breaks (somehow) and it's just a 'go when you want' kind of thing and you better hope that you have time to eat, they don't require employees to get licensed to use their forklifts (somehow), and they don't give you proper training in color consultation, some products such as the industrial and marine line, and there are other areas where I feel safety is overlooked. There was a time where I cut my hand really bad at work and I was urged by a manager to not go to the ER to get stitches (I ended up going anyway and, guess what, I needed stitches on it). I do not recommend Sherwin Williams. There are PLENTY of other companies out there that you can work for. They try to make the job and company sound amazing. DO NOT DRINK THE KOOL-AID! I've seen many people who work for this company get sucked in. These are people that have worked for the company for 20-30 years and the company doesn't care about them. Some are quitting after all this time. Some are literally demoting themselves so they get paid hourly and aren't required to be at the store 12-13 hours a day. Sorry for the novel, but this is important and you MUST know what you are getting yourself into with Sherwin Williams.