- Anti-social hours, my contract shifts included working till 11PM every Saturday and Sunday.
- They give low hours part-time contract and supplement with overtime, so you don't get as much holiday as you should.
- No 2x or 1.5x pay on bank holidays and they still open normal hours on (most) bank/national holidays (7am-11PM)
- Colleagues very unprofessional, immature and cliquey. Will make life difficult if you don't conform to their immaturity.
- Upper management refused to employ a security guard despite the fact the shop was having goods worth £50-100 being stolen on a daily basis.
- Multiple times fraudsters would get away with stealing a cigarette packet or multiple, this happened to me twice and other members of staff other times (I even went running after one of them to try and retrieve them against better judgment). Having someone for security on the door would greatly deter this in the first place but they'd also be able to catch blatant thieves trying to run out by just standing there.
- Staff were expected to be both sale assistants and security guards at the same time but the layout of the store meant if you were on one side it was near impossible to know what was going on the other side of the store. For example, in the late evening when only two people were working before close, the supervisor would usually be out back in the office or tidying the warehouse. This left one person on the shop floor for anything up to an hour at a time to supposedly monitor the whole shop which was near impossible. If the shop-floor member of staff is facing up on the end isle with the alcohol, the first isle (Meat section) is out of sight/sound and so if a thief is quiet or quick enough it was near impossible to know about it/catch them.
- I was threatened by customers multiple times and not taken seriously by management when reporting it:
One occasion a gang of 15+ teenagers gathered in the shop around 10PM when only two members of staff were working (myself and a 20 year old woman, this is the standard number of people on shift for 10PM). After my best efforts to stop a huge amount of chocolate being stolen was threatened with violence by a few of them at once and had one in my face squaring up to me threatening to punch me. This group would come back once a week for a few months to steal stuff before the police finally started to come around to the shop to deter them.
Another occasion I was threatened with violence by a customer for refusing to serve his daughter (who I ID'd as she looked under 21, she looked about 16) who was trying to buy him his cigarettes. He told me to 'watch my back' when I left the store because 'him and his friends would be waiting'. Explained all this to the manager but felt I wasn't taken seriously as nothing was done about it, apparently an abusive customer is more valuable than a staff member trying to follow procedure. Nothing violent happened in the end but whenever him and his family came in after that they would always act rude to me or make sly comments about me.
- One of the supervisors got away with pretty much anything (turning up late repeatedly, phoning in sick more often than anyone else could, napping at work in the office, doing minimal work while everyone else did his) because he was close friends with the manager. If anyone else did anything close to what the supervisor did they were punished pretty much immediately.
- Putting in extra effort into the job absolutely meaningless as it is never praised or even noticed. Being more matey with the manager seems more important to progress there than putting 110% into your job.
- As mentioned above, many shifts were expected to be done with two people maximum (sometimes from 5PM to 11PM). On busier days this was highly unrealistic as one staff member would be stuck on till while the other one tried to get through the large list of jobs, sometimes we were working 30 minutes past closing time to finish everything, which was unpaid of course.
- Automatic doors and security system malfunctioned occasionally, meaning the supervisor had to phone Co Op support and wait for them to arrive to fix it before they could head home. This meant they were still waiting in the shop at 1AM a few times. Problem took months to be properly fixed despite numerous 'repairs'.
