Rotten Retail

I worked in a store selling leather jackets, wallets and bags for three months. Our sales manager was a really poor leader and the store’s policies towards employees really sucked. We always had to be at work 15 minutes prior to the store opening, to clean the floors and get everything ready. For my first timesheet, I put those 15 minutes down as working time, but was told that the policy was not to include that in the hours, nor the time taken at the end of the day to close the store. Essentially, this was half an hour that we didn’t get paid for. In addition to this, we were constantly given shifts that lasted 7.5 hours – an 8-hour shift would have meant a half hour lunch break, which we didn’t get.  The manager was unable to give feedback directly, but just passive-aggressively left notes or told other employees to pass on messages. Employees were constantly given feedback about not cleaning the stores properly and told that everyone had to chip in equally to make the store look good, but the manager never participated and left the store in a mess for us to clean up.

Since it was a “specialty” store, on some days sales were poor because we just didn’t get enough customers who were willing to pay up for expensive jackets and bags. On those days we were told we weren’t trying hard enough and that we should fix our attitude to make more sales. When we did make lots of sales, we were rarely, if ever, were given positive feedback. None of the stores had proper break facilities, just a toilet in the back, so when we had our coffee breaks, we had to sit on the toilet lid, drinking our coffee! The manager seemed to despise all the younger employees, especially if they were pretty, and hassled us no end. None of the older employees had any problems with her, but she kept us all terrified of losing our jobs over the tiniest little things. She even told off one of my colleagues for wearing a sleeveless t-shirt on a warm day, and was told that store policy forbade armpits showing. The manager herself always wore really low-cut blouses. Obviously boobs were less offensive than armpits. We always received our shift timetables at the last minute, and never had two days off in a row, which made it impossible to ever go away for a weekend.

Just before I quit, one of the older employees was sacked for stealing thousands of Euros from the store by selling jackets and bags for cash without logging the sales in the till. I was almost disappointed that she was caught.