More pet peeves......
Here I am again with another load of things that piss me off, this time about a certain DIY store I had the misfortune to work for for about 2 years that goes by the name of homebase, so here goes:

They pay slave wages, I was on £3.63 an hour when I started, fair enough I was under 18 but it's still bloody poor when I compared it to the other places people I know have worked at.

Running out of change on the tills - generally whenever I got on a till at the start of my shift or whatever, I'd generally find the till to be crictically low on change, and you can't get up and get more yourself (god, they had kittens when I last tried that), no, you have to press this pretty lil buzzer thing on the till to tell em u need help with something, and it's not unusual to be kept waiting for fuck knows how long.

Mother f**king cheque sales - Why do people insist on paying by cheque at shops anymore? Depending on the type, it can be a total nightmare for the poor sucker on the till (that'd be me) to put it through, and if a mistake is made, u had to have a supervisor do it, and often this would involve ringing the customer's bank. A friend of mine came to work at the same store as me after a while, he left after the first day, the reason? Cheque sale went wrong and took ages to fix. I should've done the same as the same thing happened to me on my first day.

Busted fucking barcode scanners - Most of the barcode scanners (and the chip and pin card readers while i'm at it) on the tills of the store I worked at (FYI, it's the store in maidstone where a big-ass wickes store opened right across the road from us) were either broken completely or only worked intermittently, one of my pastimes on the till was when the scanner started beeping (as it would if u scaned a barcode) repeatedly when no barcode was around, hitting the bloody thing against the till to shit the damn thing up.

Damn fucking titty bumwank spend and save cards - Believe me when I say we don't offer these to every single customer that comes through our tills by choice, hell no, the manager(s) force us to, if we don't we get a grilling, enough said.

Lack of staff on tills - This was a big problem for me as usually worked the saturday morning/afternoon shift. To put u in the picture, in the store I worked at, there's 5 tills plus the information desk. Almost all the time, 2 tills at most would be manned at any one time, the result being huge ass queues, needless to say this was very annoying when the supervisors could quite call in additional staff to man the other tills, and it got infinitely worse if there was a problem in any of the transactions.

MOTHER FUCKING BARCODES!!!! - Again, this was a really big problem, as a fair proportion of the items that would come through my till either had damaged, incorrect or unreadable barcodes or none at all, the result being that another member of staff has to be called and search all over the store for the right one. I recall 2 inciddents in particular when this happened, I was running (I think) 2 packs of tiles through the scanner, I look at my screen and it thinks that a pack of tiles is a £30,000 hot tub, although we all had a good laugh about that one. The second occasion I actually got grilled big time over, a customer came to my till with 2 big packs of copper piping, I scan the stuff and it comes up suspiciously cheaply, I later find out once the customer had left that I'd lost the store about £250, needless to say the higher-ups weren't very happy with me.

Bastard managers/supervisors - There was this one guy who was supposed to be a supervisor who just appeared not long after I started working there, and he was a complete bastard and seemed to have it in for me, if I did something slightly wrong (which was commonplace as you had to break one rule to follow another there) he'd lecture me about it, to the point where I'd actually complained to the store manager about him very close to tears, he mysteriously disappeared not long after.....

End of shift - When it would come to the end of my shift, sods law would kick and the queue of customers at my till would suddenly grow, and of course with not many people manning the tills this soon started to piss me off immensley, one time I actually signed off my till 5 mins early, the supervisor in charge at time promptly hinted me down and grilled me over that. Another particular time was when the queue at my till was stupidly long, the result being that I was still stuck on my till 20mins after my shift was supposed to end, I was extremely pissed off by that time, and another customer happened to be approaching at the time just as I was about to sign off, I then remember giving the customer a look that probably made them think that if they came to my till I'd rip their head off, the customer promptly changed course to another till.

Mismanagement and other general malpratice - A few little stories to tell here, the first being that at the end of one year at the store, the store manager took all the staff through the breakdown of the various financial goings on for that year, the result being that the store made a loss of about £250,000. How could that happen I hear you ask? It was mainly down to 2 things, the first being that we'd somehow managed to overspend our electricity budget by about £30,000 the rest was really down to store shrinkage (that is products being marked down, reduced or 'disappearing' for whatever reason). Onto a story of malpratice now, I was working a late shift, i.e. up to when the store shut (which I didn't mind as there were alot less customers and more to do around the store which was a damn sight more interesting than sitting at a till for hours on end), anyways, I was tasked with getting some of those solar powered garden lights down from a big storage shelf and putting them on the relevant shelf in another part of the store, I would like to point out that said storage shelf mustve been around 20 feet high, and I hadn't been shown how to do this, the result of which was me trying to clamber onto the shelf to get the lights, where I could fall down from that height at any given moment and probably kill myself as a result, thankfully that didnt happed, but I did drop a fair few of the lights from that height. Onto another malpractice story, you know how these days people in shops and such have a thing against heavy lifting? Well one day I was tasked with moving this item a customer had returned and put it back on its shelf, the item in question happened to be a trampoline and they failed to tell me that the bastard weighed about 50kg, and me not being particularly strong back then this was a problem, I couldnt even shift the thing onto a trolley to make things easier, the result being me dragging/pushing the thing around the store until I found the place where it went.

Customer service - As I previously mentioned, at the store I worked at, a big ass wickes store opened right across the road from us, this of course meant trouble for us, and managers soon resigned themselves to thinking "if we can't win on the quality of our products and prices, we'll win on quality of customer service instead" theoretically, this wasn't a bad idea, but how they went about it had the opposite effect and failed to impress. Some suggestions included trying to engage every single customer in conversation (again, a good idea theorectically but not practically) and suggesting other items for the customer to buy that they might want to go with what they already had, to me this was just a pathetic form of advertising and if the customer needed anything else they would already have it.

Apologies for the enormous rant, but I had to get it all out of my system.

Length? About 2 years and no money afterwards (it was all eaten up by driving lessons).
(Howling_Mad Gave God the finger on:, Sun 4 May 2008, 5:50, 1 reply)

aah!
Maidstone finally gets mentioned in a QOTW
( mister.f is now married, Sun 4 May 2008, 15:04, closed)