I worked at a Fastenal in Canada for about 6 months while in grad school about 3 years ago. My job was working in the store handling walk-in sales, calls from customers, keeping the store clean and stocked, and occasionally calling customers to get them to pay. There were only five employees for the entire store - me and another part time person doing the same job as me, the store manager and two sales guys. The sales guys would go out and deliver orders to customers, meet with customers to generate orders, meet new customers to try to get business, etc. The store manager also did some outside sales work. I was coming from 10 years of engineering in the auto industry so I took a huge pay cut to work part time as an entry level retail person, but I was doing it more for the 'not go insane with boredom because school took up a lot less time than I thought it would' aspect. Still, I was making ~$12 an hour CDN, no benefits, as a brand new part time person. Full time people were commission, with bonus IIRC.
Each store is company owned, not a franchise, so transfering to a different store or getting promoted up into management is a lot easier than other places. If you're looking for a role in store management, you're given a lot of latitude to make your store successful, but you're also held accountable for meeting the sales numbers that corporate dictates. Some of the metrics you'll have to hit are monthly sales, profit margin, new accounts, collecting from delinquent accounts, etc. You are given good support from corporate with flyers, catalogs, suggestions for boosting sales, etc. I enjoyed working there and would have kept at it for more than 6 months but my schedule for school wouldn't allow it (I was working 7-12 every morning but some of my classes were only offered from 10-2 so it kind of screwed things up). If you're hands on as far as building things and can speak intelligently about the needs your customers may have, you'll be highly sought after. I was the only person in my store who had any knowledge of welding/machining or manufacturing processes, but the other people knew a lot about construction and stuff (if you're doing this kind of work you want this anchor, not this because blah blah blah).
One thing I didn't like was the point-of-sale software. It was some custom-brewed, cobbled together system that made things a lot more complicated than it should have. If a customer called and wanted to order something they've ordered 8 times before, it was very difficult to look up how much we charged them last time. It could be done but required manually paging through old orders instead of just searching customer X and part Y. Also, despite all stores being company owned, customer accounts were only accessible at the store they set it up in. There are two Fastenals in Windsor and we'd regularly have customers come into our store who had set up their account at the other store. In order to put things onto the account I'd have to call the other store, get them to tell me the customers were in good standing, I'd have to transfer my inventory to that store who would then 'sell' the stuff to the customer. They would get our commission, but we'd also get commission from our customers who went to their store, so I guess it was probably a wash. It was a pain in the butt though, and we lost many sales from people who got tired of waiting while I was trying to get through to the other store to get the sale through. They could have paid with a credit card, but most of our customers did not have company credit cards and just had PO and job numbers, and that should be enough for a quick sale.
As for a lot of the complaints people have about the store, I don't think people realize that Fastenal is not a hardware store, they are an industrial supply company that happens to have stores. The stores are really there to handle walk-in sales from existing accounts. I know it sounds like crappy customer service but we hated having an average joe walk in off the street looking for 4 bolts to fix their lawnmower, and we would price accordingly. Also, if I'm on the phone with a customer who needs $1500 worth of bolts in 3 days, I'm not going to drop the phone to help you figure out if you've got a 1/4-20 or 1/4-28 bolt and whether it's grade 5 or 8 or stainless or whatever. If I wasn't busy with someone else, I'd certainly help you figure out what you needed, but I wasn't going to split open a box of 25 so you could get 2. Our focus was on construction companies, manufacturing, etc, not the public, that's why the fasteners usually are in boxes of 25-100 and not sold individually. We happily directed people to the Home Depot down the street for small quantities, and we always tried to be friendly about it. We also got tired of hearing "the Dewalt drill at Home Depot is half the price of this one, you guys are soooo expensive". Just because they're both yellow and are both 1/2" cordless drills doesn't mean they are the same on the inside. Our construction guys understood this, most of the public didn't.
As for not having what you're looking for, we stocked what our customers usually needed, and could get most other stuff very quickly. We could get you any bolt you wanted, including custom made fasteners if you really needed it. I would call fastener manufacturers in Canada and the US just about every day asking for pricing on 1000-10,000 fasteners for customers. I wasn't going to go through the trouble of ordering 3 or 4 special fasteners for someone though, unless you were a regular customer.
I don't know where our suppliers made their fasteners, so I can't speak to the PRC complaint, though I wouldn't doubt it. Most of the stuff that wasn't "stock" would come from supplier warehouses in North America, but they may have been supplied from factories in Asia. As for other weird requests, we did do some work with some high end auto restoration shops around here and were usually able to get what they needed as far as bolts, studs, clips, etc. We also had some aircraft restoration guys who wanted to order special fasteners, but they were only listed in the Mil-Spec catalog we had and couldn't get them shipped to Canada.
If anyone has any more questions, either about the company as a whole or about why it seems to suck when you walk into the store sometimes, feel free to ask. I was only there a short time but will try to answer.
Bob
