Please bear with me (no pun intended), useful and truthful information for prospective applicants:
> "Sales and smiles". The company literally has print-out sheets with categories that each worker must comply to, and they call them 'must-see behaviours'. Basically, each area of the shop is divided into sections like "greet", "stuff", "dress" and "name". And each section has an employee stationed there, and for each section of the shop, there are FIVE must-see behaviours that, in some cases, are ridiculous. An example is the "greet" station, where every guest has to be greeted with a pre-prepared script that sounds awfully impersonal and rehearsed, and if a guest is missed at the door, the employee literally has to follow them round the shop until they track them down and can say the greet script. And here's the kicker: if you decide to word it a little differently or if you mistakenly miss one of the must-see behaviours, you get marked down. Yep, that's right, they GRADE you on your performance like you're in school. The grades go from 1 to 5, 5 being the best and 1 being the worst. And believe me, I'm one of the hardest workers out there, but I consistently received 2s for missing out some of these ridiculous 'must-see behaviours'. And getting these low scores is then recorded on an official document that they send to head office, and they take you out to the back room and talk through the whole sheet with you so they can point out where you're failing (I had many a conversation where the manager not only criticised my work performance, but also called me "way too nervous" and "not the regular fit for the company they'd usually choose" and "always so quiet".) It's massively demoralising and demotivating to consistently be told that you're not doing your job well, even though you're giving it your all.
> Pay. As a minimum-wage worker, I was earning around £4.50 an hour. In other jobs that my friends of the same age are currently working, they're being paid between £7 and £9 an hour for a lot less stressful work, so it's clear to see that Build-A-Bear offer far below an average. This is especially irritating considering the sheer amount of work that you're expected to do when you're there; there's never a moment when you can sit down and have a breather, and with all the 'must-see behaviours' that they expect from you, it really is a LOT of work for PITIFUL money. I did a whole bunch of hours every month, and it only racked up to about £100 each time, that's how poor it is. Not to mention the fact that I was never, in the entire time I worked there, given a payslip to prove that I was being paid for the correct hours.
> Management. The management in the shop I worked at really, really sucked. The manager basically didn't do any work herself, she simply held a clipboard with the "sales and smiles" grading sheet and hovered around you while you did your work, breathing down your neck. God, no wonder she kept saying I was nervous, I had her watching over me the whole time! She was unfair when grading me on the 'sales and smiles', and I even overheard her telling another worker who'd graded me that she'd given me too high a mark, even though she hadn't even been there to see me working so she couldn't possibly have known what my performance was like. In short, I felt that she was far too harsh on me as an employee, patronising when it came to talking through the "sales and smiles" sheets, and really not supportive at all. In fact, she added a whole lot more stress on top of me studying for A-Levels at the time.
> Hours and shifts. The hours are constantly fluctuating and changing at Build-A-Bear, so you could work four hours one day and be bumped up to a full eight the next. The rotas aren't organised until about a week before you need them, so it's hard to plan things in your private life too. They also have shifts where you're "on call", so they can call you up if someone phones in sick - fair enough, a lot of companies do that. Except in most companies it seems like "on call" is a last resort, whereas with Build-A-Bear, they'll call you up on a day when it's completely silent in the shop just because they need someone to come and re-stuff the stuffing machine. This takes time out of your day, and also they'll leave it until the last minute to call and expect you to be there in a huge rush. I've had days before where I haven't even been "on call", I've been officially off work, but they've still called me up and expected me to work a seven and a half hour shift. As for breaks, you get about ten minutes off if you work longer than 4 hours, because that's a legal requirement of hiring a teenager. Ten minutes, though, that's pitiful, especially when you consider that the manager gets a whole hour off.
> Training. Or, lack thereof. My training was ridiculously simple - I ended up till-training myself, so I was handling people's money (in figures that reached up to £200+ sometimes) even though I'd not been told how to work the till system or anything. And yet, I was still blamed for any minor mistakes as if I somehow should have known better. Party-training is also poor, they make you watch a party and then throw you in the deep end, trying to control 10 screaming kids all by yourself in a small shop that's already packed with regular customers, all in under an hour. They honestly care more about the "greet" section of the store, making sure each guest is greeted with their script, than whether the person stuffing the teddy bear knows how to stitch it up, or whether the person on the till knows how to handle the damn credit card machine. It was very stressful and also extremely confusing, because you know in your head that it's not your fault that you haven't been trained adequately, but they still try and MAKE it your fault.
I think that's all there is to cover, basically. There was a lot of favouritism going on with the manager favouring certain members of staff, and if you hadn't already been there for a while, you were pretty much treated like dispensable resources. It's very demoralising and I left each shift feeling exhausted and beaten-down, very patronised. The customers were the best part about the whole thing, which isn't something you often hear about retail jobs. Anyway, seriously reconsider if you're thinking about applying - it might seem like a fun place to work on the surface, but really, it's hard, and you'll have to do things in a very cookie-cutter way. Always smiling, always pushing sales of add-on items, that sort of thing.
