Pros
The best thing about the job by far were the other colleagues. There were some fantastic personalities and everybody worked well as a team and supported each other. The only thing that stops you going mad over peak are your colleagues. Also being able to keep up to date with technology and always being the first to try out brand new bits of kit was always enjoyable.
Cons
There was a massive lack of motivation at the particular store I worked at and management did very little to fix it. As a result I saw 15 different staff members leave over the course of 1 year and many staff would constantly talk about how much they hated working there. This created a very negative environment to work in. The KPI's were ridiculous and there were far too many to keep track of. Your performance was judged on how many attachments you could sell (e.g cables on a TV or antivirus and cloud on a computer) and this resulted in sales staff doing anything they could, even if it was not in the customers best interests, to sell attachments. This often meant that customers would leave the store unhappy after being pressured into buying things they didn't want. The morning briefs and weekly/monthly performance reviews were always negative and only ever focused on where you were failing instead of where you were doing well and as a result staff always felt under appreciated and de motivated. Training was non existent, most people weren't even sent on their induction training until several months after joining the business. This meant many sales staff lacked product knowledge and were therefore not very useful when it came to helping customers. Pay is shocking, you start on minimum wage and this increases by about 10-15p per hour based on how much training you do to a maximum of around £7.75 an hour. The biggest problem is that management are completely unwilling to send you on training courses and so pay rises are few and far between. The systems in use by the company are also for the most part extremely slow and counter productive. It could take over 5 minutes just to load customer offers and printing out a business receipt required the use of a totally outdated and useless piece of software which over complicated everything and crashed so often that many staff would just simply refuse to serve business customers. The tills were always breaking and the Internet was so slow it was like using a dial up connection. There were many occasions where customers would mock our systems for being slow and useless. The way the rotas were calculated resulted in many occasions where there would only be one member is staff serving customers on the shop floor for hours at a time, this meant that many people would simply walk out after waiting for hours without being served or would be extremely frustrated when a member of the sales team finally was able to serve them and therefore much less receptive to the attachment sales pitch.
