Pros
I started last year as a Christmas temp. It was my first job and I was only seventeen and the pay was £7.35 an hour, which, for that age, was very good. Some of the managers were nice. Customer experience was good, and the intensive training they gave was very useful to apply to other retail jobs.
Cons
Where do I start? The only managers bearable to work with were the lower tier ones, and even then they considered themselves above the temporary staff. They often treat you unfairly, expecting you to just know and understand the layout of the store off by heart. They gave me a one day induction, in which I was shown briefly how to log on to the till, how to scan items and access the transaction settings. Anything else on there was a mystery to me. Being under 18, I was unable to sell alcohol and had to call for a colleague every time I was to scan an item of alcohol. Colleagues and managers often got impatient and annoyed at this fact. And then, when I rang the bell for assistance to sell the alcohol, staff on the shop floor would often ignore me and leave me and customers waiting 10 minutes at a time to approve one bottle of wine! When working as a customer assistant in a simply food store, you will either work coldchain, ambient or tills if you are temp staff. When stocking shelves you are expected to stock from the back, which can often take a while, as products are often in the wrong place, or messy or in the wrong date order. Just stocking one product, if done properly like the managers religiously tell you to, can take up to ten minutes. Compare that with not quite knowing the layout or whereabouts of products quite yet and you can imagine that it does take a couple of hours to work one entire cage of products. Rather than being sympathetic to your inexperience or even aid you, my manager chose to constantly berate me, pressuring me to work faster, and then criticising my messy job when I tried to work at a quicker pace. I would often walk into the stock room to hear her slagging off me and temp staff for working too slow. Making me feel anxious and helpless. Not only this, but I often work 5 hour shifts. 4pm until 9pm. On my contract of shift hours, it says that I get a 30 minute unpaid break. I only get paid for 4.3 hours work. When starting employment, my manager told me that my break is decided by her or my section co. I will be told when to take it etc. Most nights, my manager forgot about me and my fellow temp colleagues. It was often an hour before the end of our shift and we would still be waiting for our break. Then, we would confront our manager, they acted annoyed and as though we don’t deserve a break. Note that over 18’s only get a 15 minute break. As an under 18, my colleague and I were supposed to receive a half hour break. In my three weeks of working here I have never recieved my full half hour. I have been told every shift that I am only to take 15 minute breaks. This was fine for a while, I simply thought that my hour sheet was wrong. However, checking my payslip I discovered I was getting my 30 minute break deducted from my pay, even though I had only ever taken 15 minute breaks. Adding up, per week of working there I wasn’t getting paid for a whole hours worth of work! I challenged my manager. Her reply? “Oh. We owe you.” And she walked away and never mentioned it again! The real nail in the coffin for me though, is what happened last week. As you well might know, M&S manage their employees hours, payslips and other admin on the “M&S People System”. Here, you are able to manage your availability for extra hours, view your roster and payslip and request holiday from HR. Last week, I had gotten three messages from HR, reading that “my request for holiday has been approved “. I had not ever requested holiday. I only had three weeks of work left and I needed the money. Checking my roster, I noticed my hours from the 21st of December to the 9th of January had been cancelled and replaced with “Unpaid Holiday”. Worried and concerned, I asked my manager the next day. You want to know what they’d done? For me and my fellow temp staff? They’d cut our contact three weeks short. Bearing in mind, I’d only had one week notice. I was horrified. I was furious. I needed that money. I would never have worked there if I had known I was only going to work there for three weeks! What absolutely disgusting behaviour! I have no idea why my managers did this. They seemed to do it to all temp staff. And it seemed very fishy as they did it as though I had requested time off! I imagine they plan to keep our salaries to give themselves commisssion! I am appalled. I have warned all my friends and family to not work here. It is an awful company that is only concerned about money and sales. It disgusts me that I was ever part of such a capitalist organisation with no regard for the common person, both customer and employee. I hope they are to be bankrupt soon, it would seem that customers are becoming wise to the fact their food is ridiculously overpriced with awful quality.
