Pros
AAP is a stable company with an abundance of facilities, which opens a wide field of advancement opportunity for team members at all levels. AAP seems to genuinely care about team members, training, employee retention, and their compensation levels are competitive for exempt salaried positions. AAP is fairly good about sharing the vision behind corporate level decisions, as well as the "big picture" ideology behind the decision.
Cons
While they share the vision and big picture surrounding ideas, they do not appear to do enough beta testing with chain wide rollouts. The company does not focus on handling individual problems with team members at the origination point of the problem. Instead, they tend to issue chain wide policies that make successful managers feel unappreciated and underestimated. For example, a standardized schedule has been developed for salaried Store Managers that requires an hour lunch, involves working every Friday night and then opening every Saturday morning except for one per month, giving managers every Wednesday off, even if it is their warehouse truck replenishment day, and making anything that even resembles flexibility with scheduling a distant memory. The company frequently makes knee jerk decisions that affect the entire chain. AAP is following Walmart's model of cutting labor expenses to the lowest possible levels. The problem with this approach is that AAP's core merchandise requires customer facing team member interactions. If there are less team members facing customers, stores are going to generate less revenue. Employee bonuses and pay increases are based on achieving sales expectations. IT software and hardware is outdated and needs to be replaced. Upper management has all but eliminated managing markets based on the demographics and characteristics of that market. All too often, decisions are made with only the affect of the entire company in mind. For example, company wide DIY sales may not be dropping, but if DIY is suffering in areas that it used to be strong, and commercial is excelling in another, sales stay stagnant. Not losing focus on what you have earned, while making investments to get something that you haven't, is not something that the company believes in. The company is investing in commercial growth by gutting the DIY sales coverage instead of maintaining DIY staffing levels and actually making an investment in commercial business to ensure future success.