After chasing the manager for a month with phone calls and in person stop-ins, I finally got a chance to meet with him and his associates. He asked about my background and availability and then extended an offer.

The very first thing they asked me after the universal "So, tell me about yourself..." was how much I wanted to make per hour. I was caught a bit off-guard, since I am used to this question being asked towards the end of an interview rather than the very beginning. I told them I was completely open to negotiation, and asked them for the position's pay range. They said they couldn't provide that information. So I said that I had checked glassdoor.com, with the range given as $10-$15 and with an average of $12. I told the interviewer that I would therefore like to start the negotiation at $12 (given my experience and qualifications I did not want to look lacking in confidence by groveling for the very minimum pay, but I also didn't want to look greedy), but that I was fully willing to go lower than that if necessary. The interviewer nodded and scribbled something down, asked me a very small number of rather curt questions, seemed completely disinterested in anything I had to say and ushered me out. I got an email in almost record time informing me that I was no longer in the running for the position. I was called back a while later to interview for a lower clerk position, and the first thing the (different) interviewer told me was that I was automatically disqualified from the Assistant Manager position because the first interviewer wrote down that I had DEMANDED absolutely no less than $12 an hour, and that that was more than their maximum pay range for the position. When I explained that I had tried to ask for that specific store's pay range and was denied, and that glassdoor.com's posted pay range was the *only* thing I actually had to estimate from, I was admonished that glassdoor.com's statistics are skewed because the pay ranges differ by state, and that I shouldn't be going to a third party to get information on their company. All in all, I felt it was a very convoluted, disrespectful, unfair and borderline hostile experience, and in hindsight, I am very, VERY glad they didn't hire me. I ended up getting a job at one of their main competitors, where I get paid a lot more, treated very kindly and fairly, *and* it's a company that has *much* higher ratings on glassdoor.com than The Fresh Market does! So I really can't complain, though I urge everybody to look at just how low this company's overall scores are on glassdoor.com compared to other grocery stores, and apply at your own risk......