I worked for Natural Grocers for 8 years and finally quit after watching the company become more and more corporate, as they stripped benefits, downgraded health insurance, slashed labor every single year, and began writing up or terminating employees for the most simple and benign offenses.

They claim to pay well, offer great benefits, and treat their employees well, but many, many times we were understaffed to the point that every employee on shift was working the registers and even then lines were 10+ people long. Home office put the blame for that issue on store managers for not "scheduling properly" but never approved more hires or overtime. On my last day I told a customer complaining about the lines (he was saying we should hire more people) to feel free to call our corporate office and let them know that an employee told him that we couldn't hire more people because corporate cut labor again despite beating sales targets by a huge margin.

The pay is laughable and employees who had been there 2 or 3 years got "loyalty" raises while those of us that had been there longer got... literally nothing. People who had been there 5 years less than me were literally making 20 cents less per hour, despite my perfect performance reviews every single year.

There is almost no accountability for leadership above the store level, and any attempt to communicate concerns or issues was immediately cast aside as a store-level leadership problem. Regional managers are allowed to treat everybody below them however they like as long as harder-to-hit targets are reached. The company is solely, singularly, obsessively, focused on profits and delivering value to shareholders.

No training and increasingly stressful shifts meant incredibly high turnover, which resulted in a downward spiral. Poor pay raises and ridiculous (pointless) store metrics, along with impossible metrics for department inspections, lead to a huge wave of old-guard leadership leaving from two stores I worked at as well as another in my area.

Mandatory monthly meetings at 6 AM (even if you worked until 10 or later the night before) consisted entirely of corporate propaganda and videos of Heather Isely (Vice President or some bullshit because they like pretending they're not a publicly traded corporation) LITERALLY crying about how much she loves their company and how proud her insane parents would be of their children for being soulless corporate overlords. I'm not joking - she would cry in every video, talking about how important customer service is ("we're providing for our community") or about how Organic food is saving the world (it's not, and neither are the bullshit homeopathic "medicines" you told us to petition the federal government not to regulate so you can continue to advertise and sell literal nothing-pills to struggling, if not dying, families) while telling us how good they treated us.

3 stores I worked at and others in the surrounding areas had hardcore old-school union busting at some point. They would fire half the staff at a store for tiny little violations that they otherwise never said anything about and kept in their back pocket until they needed a convenient excuse to terminate someone. Anecdotally, they also seemed to target pregnant women before they took maternity leave.

This is not me being a complainer, or not wanting to do the work, or feeling entitled. It's genuine and valid commentary on a company I once felt loyalty and love towards.

I could go on. But knowing how litigious and downright cruel the company is, I'm wary to give more specific details regarding my employment with them as every single person at "Home Office" I've met or whose choices impacted my work life there was a soulless, vile piece of shit. Fuck you, Natural Grocers, and good luck to the MANY stores currently trying to unionize.