Wilkinsons

I must say it has to be the worst job i have ever been in, well the only
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Welcome to the real world. Where we make ourselves miserable to pay our bills.

I remember working retail and it being crap, it is enlightening, it teaches you people are fundamentally evil, inconsiderate, greedy, selfish and in general disgusting.

What you need to do is stop taking it seriously, retail isn't a serious job, have a pop at the odd rude customer, play about in the warehouse, intentionally annoy your boss. It's retail, no one takes retail jobs seriously.

I never took it seriously, and I wouldn't expect anyone to do it nowadays, all jobs suck but they've all got perks. Joys of retail is the expectation that you're going to mess about.
 
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oweneades said:
I know what you mean about lack of staffing on a saturday though. Its pitiful on the managements part to expect one poor cashier to serve everyone.
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The people responsible for staffing levels probably won't really know what's happening and wouldn't care if they did. They'll rarely if ever be in the shop and they'll never have to deal with customers. It's almost certain that local management have no control over it.

At the cheaper end of the market, the only priority now is cutting costs. It has a high priority everywhere, but at the cheaper end of the market it's the only thing that matters. Talk about customer service and valuing employees is just advertising blather for the company's image.

When cutting costs, payroll will be considered a prime target. It will be a considerable proportion of overall costs and one which the company has a lot more control over than the others. Most of the cost units formerly known as employees will be at the bottom end of the hierarchy. Surely we don't really need so many "valued team members"? The remainder can do more work each - there's almost no risk of them getting a better job nowadays. Staff get breaks? Not any more - that's a whole load of 10 minutes that the company no longer has to pay for. Even the law doesn't really matter - they're not going to do anything about not getting the legal minimum 20 minutes on shifts over 6 hours. The next level up can be cheapened too - move most of the actual management power up the hierarchy and reposition local management as primarily supervisors and customer fronts. Then you can have less of them and pay new ones a lower salary as they're at a lower position in hierarchy. Also, since they're salaried you can make them work more hours for no more pay. Costs cut!

So everything will be run at absolute minimum to provide minimal service to customers at an average level of customers. At best.

If you ever get the impression when you're a customer that staff have no time for you and you're just getting in the way of their work, that's because staff have no time for you and you're just getting in the way of their work. They'll try to conceal that fact as much as they can because that's part of their job, but it is true because the job is deliberately made that way.

People who haven't worked at the low end in the last 10 years and especially in the last 5 years are very unlikely to understand how much it has changed. My employer serves as a good example. It's low-end work for very low pay and unsociable hours. 10 years ago, it was quite difficult to get staff. Adverts might not return any applicants at all, let alone any good ones. People could quite easily get low-end badly paid work with better hours. Now, an advert might well return 300 applicants.

Of course, my employer is better than most and I'm not saying so only because they will sack employees who say anything less than complimentary about them.
 
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