Waitrose reviews

Discount is not great considering the price of the food No union representation Poor rate of pay compared to other retail jobs (used to rely on the annual bonus to make it up - that bonus has been declining rapidly - this year chances are it will be between 0 and 3%) Pension fund is in a shambles Whole business being propped up by John Lewis sales They now expect you to do five jobs in the time given for one Section managers generally appear to have little training in leadership or management before being given an ipad, an air of authority and a total disregard for the welfare of their staff. They're implementing 'modern Waitrose' whereby you just keep getting pulled from doing a job on one section to do a job on another (whether you're trained or not) because the section managers can't plan. You then return to your original job (eventually) to find yourself getting a telling off for not having done it quickly enough (or at all). One branch rota. There isn't space for me to tell you all that's bad about that! Suffice to say, its not working. To save money they don't recruit until people leave (school age heading to Uni - happens every year at the same time and they know it does) so you end up short staffed, underpaid and overworked. Turnover is 80% plus in an industry where the average is 33% - and they wonder why?

I've worked in two stores in London over the past year. The first store I worked for is fully Modern Waitrose, I was trained on every section but instead of training all members of staff, they only trained 2 of us in the whole store. So I was originally hired for Operations however I ended up on food service on most of my shifts as they were so understaffed. That store had great people, but everyone was stressed and there was never enough staff. Management was bad there was a period of a month were I had no manager, suppliers didn't get paid, stock was left out of date on shelves, I'd daily waste a trolley of food. One day £200 of steaks, because they hadn't got staff in to reduce them. Most of management you never saw on the shop floor helping out, they were either in the office looking busy or on their phones. I was originally temporary but was made permanent after 3 months but they cut my hours without prior warning. You're at the mercy of what's convenient for them. Also asking for hours to be changed is impossible. They now have put in a rule that you have to work a minimum of 20hrs a week and many students have had to leave because of this. The second store I moved too never had any staff and I never saw the manger on the shopfloor unless she really had to, she was on holiday a lot and always went home at a convenient time. I was there a short period of time but it was enough for me to workout that if you showed any enthusiasm you'd be relied on to do the stuff no one else wanted to do. The staff at this store were really lazy and would never help out. They tried to make me csa within 2 weeks of transferring, and they made me stay pass my hours because they had no other staff to cash up. I didn't get a thank you for it. I had to tell one of the mangers who was running checkouts one night (who'd worked in the company for 10 years) how to cash the tills up. I was shocked with all the experience she had she was asking me...just a supermarket assistant. If you ask a lot of the older members of staff things have changed and their satisfaction has gone down. The company doesn't have enough money, so all the things that made the partnership a great place to work have been cut, breakfast in the partner dining room is dying out.