I worked there part-time while in college, about 20 to 30 hours per week depending on what all was going on at school (tests, etc.)

Your experience with Fastenal will depend highly upon your branch manager, or even your regional manager. Be advised that Fastenal makes it's money on doing more with less...that means no matter what you do or how hard you work, it won't ever be enough. There is no such thing as being caught-up at Fastenal, which wears you down. It's like you're always 3 days behind, and constantly having to apologize to customers. Most stores are severely under-staffed and it is done on purpose, normally at the hand of the regional manager. The regional manager gets paid his bonuses based on sales vs. overhead. There is more to it than just numbers of dollars vs. no. of employees...but a regional manager will hear nothing of it. The store I was in struggled to make $100,000 per month with 3 full timers and 1 part-timer. We did all we could to service the customers and get all the product sold and delivered, but had to always get an earful about not keeping the store clean enough, not making enough sales calls, not filling out the mountain of silly forms and surveys that corporate sent down the pipeline, and not counting inventory enough...there simply just wasn't enough hours in the day to do all that stuff...an extra employee or two would have alleviated that, but would be more overhead for the same sales dollars...get what I'm saying?

I was fortunate to have a branch manger that had some sense and was very easy to get along with. He had an understanding with me - as long as I was punctual, was able to work unsupervised, and took care of the customers, he wouldn't make me have to conform to or mess with a lot of the corporate BS that came down the pipeline. Dress code was always an issue for the regional manager and corporate, as they had a khaki pants/collared shirt requirement - 90% of the places I delivered to were dirty, hot, nasty, work environments where I always got good and dirty making those deliveries. There was no way I was going to be buying being new khakis and polos each week to meet the dress code...and the branch manager understood that.

You're a number to Fastenal, and that's all. At Christmas, your bonus is a box of candy they send to the store on one of their delivery trucks....on that box is your employee number, with a barcode...that's all you are there, and all you'll ever be.

So basically, it's okay for part-time, but don't plan on making a career there...you'll age twice as fast, if not more at that place. They wanted me to take over one of the stores as a branch manager and I turned it down...they thought I was crazy and hounded me about it for a week...I finally told them that I was in college and higher aspirations than branch manager at Fastenal...I thought they would fire me when I said that, but they just laughed and that was the end of that issue.

Most guys I knew that worked at Fastenal left for Grainger - they all got a much higher paycheck at Grainger, and a lot less stress too.