Approach with caution (and keep looking for other jobs while you're here)
Pros
Fellow colleagues and warehouse staff are very friendly and helpful; they always lend a helping hand when you need one (and so do most of the managers). The store allowed me to put my knowledge of computers, audio systems, and TVs to good use. You also get 10% off anything in the store (except for Apple products), and that even extends to sister brand Carphone Warehouse.
Cons
Constant pressure to push the care plans to customers, as well as McAfee LiveSafe with laptops and tablets; you get a verbal rollicking when you're not selling enough of them - especially if you're on the cash desk - or worse, get banned from certain sections of the store (usually the laptops and tablets). A couple of the managers are insensitive to colleagues because of this, and one of them even reduced a few of us to tears on occasion, so watch out for them if you go to work there. This one seems to be protected by the other managers because before their promotion, they were one of the top sales colleagues; several complaints were filed against them by various colleagues in my short time there, but no action was taken. (I originally posted this back in December 2015 while I was working there, but it was removed without any notice, probably because I named the tyrannical manager, so I won't name them this time, but rest assured, you'll find out soon enough who it is, mostly likely through the colleagues warning you about them.) The pay is also poor. You start out at minimum wage - £6.70/hour, in my case - and then gain an extra 15p/hour after completing the mandatory training, as well as the induction day. One of the managers told me that legally, we aren't allowed to work on the shop floor before completing all of that; if that's true, then I was illegally made to work for the first two weeks (one colleague also told me that they didn't have their induction day until three months after starting). There's no extra pay for working overtime or bank holidays; the only extra pay available is time-and-a-half after 39 hours in a week (which begins on Sundays there), so naturally, no one - not even the managers - go above that 39 hour mark, except in extraordinary circumstances, like a severe shortage of available staff. And speaking of overtime, that gets paid two weeks in arrears, so overtime in the two weeks before payday won't get paid to you until the next payday, which is every four weeks. One of the worst parts of the stores are the terminals used for processing orders; they're 10+ year-old HP computers running on Intel Pentium 4 processors and Windows XP, so as you can imagine, they slow down and freeze regularly, keeping customers unnecessarily waiting and giving the company a bad image. The saving grace is there's a staff wifi network, so if you need to look up some information for a customer, it's much quicker to do it on your phone (just make sure to ask for the password from a colleague).
