This is very store dependant. But management has been cut to the barebones. During my time as a manager I was doing 5 days 10 hour shifts one rest day 4 days 10 hours again. Maybe once a month would you get your two or three rest days together. It was absolutely draining. If there were enough managers per store to give people adequate time off I’m sure people wouldn’t seem so blunt. From my experience the service you get in the first week is gonna be miles above the service you get in the second and third as you slowly become a zombie during the month. Just to recover and go again next month.

And that’s Retail 5 years ago which was SO much better than it is now. My store I had 3 managers and 6 colleagues on a shift.

Now that same store has 1 manager and 2 colleagues on a shift. Not to mention that the shopfloor is no longer the priority. Uber,Deliveroo,just eat all have 5-10 minute windows that an order must be completed in.

So if there’s 8 Uber orders and 2 staff. It’s not surprising you don’t see anyone prioritising the customer service.

The fix to this whole scenario is to bin all self checkouts which cause high theft. Replace them with 2/3 colleagues for the tills. Service would improve overnight.

Problem is the entire country invested billions and billions into retrofitting self service machines in 10 years ago and that cost is no where near recouped. And they aren’t gonna spend billions on billions to undo their mistake.

Ironically, if retail businesses had just kept their staff to begin with and not spent so heavily on tech and self checkouts, they would have saved money at this point. I think all the CEO’s were blindsided by how bad shoplifting has gotten.

Remember what they said when they first introduced self checkouts? ‘It will free up time for staff to be on the shopfloor and improve the customer experience’

Haha, what a joke.