Co-op reviews

Complete lack of understanding what it's like to work and run a store from the upper management out of store. What they expect you to do in an average week against the amount of hours you are given to do these tasks is a joke. Let alone serve customers to an acceptable standard. Even with working 60/70 hours a week it was not possible. The complete lack of reward for store managers for achieving any goals set is appalling. The way managers have been treated over the past year or 2 regarding pay is also a joke also. Pay rises for lower levels and nothing for managers and they wonder why motivation and moral is at an all time low... I sat in my last managers meeting a couple of months ago looking around, never have I seen such depression in one room, I thought I was at some kind of rehab class. Something needs to happen quick to what was a good company to work for or there won't be anyone left.

Staff are treated appallingly. You are given very little training and then thrown in the deep end. There were only training systems for the simplest procedures - the more complicated and difficult ones you had to learn for the first time with a customer on the other line. Senior management had a very clear "three strikes and you're out" policy - three "breaches" (for example, not reading a script) and you were sacked, regardless of how long you had been working for the company. One guy was sacked for this after working there for 6 years. Everyone lived in constant fear of getting a breach and being sacked. How long you took for your break and lunch was also closely monitored - if you took 11 minutes rather than 10 they wanted to know why. You also had to deal with appalling systems that had been in place since the 1960s (that is not an exaggeration) which came up with error messages constantly, which meant you would have to explain to a customer that you couldn't insure their car that day and would have to ring them back when the system was working. The hours were also terrible - an 8 or 9 hour shift and at one point we were walking an eight day week every fortnight.