After about three years of handing in my CV to same manager and his staff I finally got my first job in retail at the place I always wanted to work. I won’t disclose too much as I’d rather this blog be as anonymous as possible but lets just say it was a well know video game store. So after finally getting in as a ‘Christmas temp‘ I spent the next three months proving how passionate I was about selling this products, how much I knew about them and how much I want/needed this job, above the seven other people I was in competition with. So when it came down to the final cut, I was the last one standing and was damn proud of it I must say.
I loved it all at first..
So I pretty much loved the job, making my own money for the first time, a great manager who gave us all rewarding tough love and experience with the public that left you never knowing what to expect next. The company went into administration about 7 months into my employment there and most of our tight team pretty much ran out of fear of becoming jobless. What can I say? I don’t blame them. Only one guy stood firm (the one who helped me get my foot in the door) and he has for about 6 or so years now, he genuinely loves his job and I admire that. A new manager took over and the work environment was no longer enjoyable, he knew nothing about the products and was basically a total idiot to say the least, so quickly began job searching!
I want my old job back..
I managed to quickly get my self an interview at a retail store specialising in particular tech products and got the job straight away. I loved the environment, my new work uniform, I felt great, it was a fresh start, until I realised how disorganised the managers were, seventy percent of the staff did not care and how evil humans that shop are monsters.
We were under staffed which was is not fun, when you have about six customers standing around waiting to be ‘approached’, and shouting at you to ‘bloody help’ them and ‘do your job’ as you run around like a headless chicken collecting products from the warehouse and trying to sell all possible attachments at the same time.
I’m not a sales-women so pushing products on to people didn’t really work for me and I never reached my targets after a while, so the managers would make me offer other different crap. Why would I offer more crap if they didn’t want the first crap?!
Consumers are mean..
So considering I worked for a store selling technology its pretty ironic that our website was a bunch a shit, so customers were always reserving items out of stock. We had to deal with customers shouting at us all the time over something we personally couldn’t control. It didn’t help that only my self and one other girl made the effort to check the reservations regularly. We would call as many customers as we could get through before being screamed at to help some one on the shop floor, who weren’t actually going to buy anything they just want to spent thirty mins asking stupid questions.
Then you have the customers who don’t read or listen to our return policy and think that by shouting at you that you will refund a product that they have used and decided they no longer want. Oh and I won’t to go into the ordeal they call the Christmas holidays, I nearly had a mental break down and ended up walking out if my shift an hour early on Christmas eve, because of crazy humans wanting to buy everything and buy it now.
Point being, it made me hate people, see how cunning sales people can be and realise how bad the pay is!
Found this at image that Pretty much sums up working in retail.
ThatThingCalledLife 