Toxic short retail workplace experiences

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Retail jobs, and not only, have a higher chance to be on the wrong side of fairness and healthy as a work environment.

Share your stories.


Typically, for me have been bosses without any concern about the workers, or expecting too much and being verbally abusive. Dropping me after 3 months. Typically I was doing my best, so it's not really my fault. Some demands, be to the store then why arent you back yet, were unrealistic and not part of job requirement tasks. Some people want everything, and done in a second and get really crazy about how they talk to you and tell you personal details about their private family life, use the office where you're working as a lounge and meeting with their friends.

I was unlucky enough when they kept me for 1 year.

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I was in and out of retail from the early 1980s to the early 2000s which was plenty of time to have lots of different qualities of experience.
For my own good I prefer to forgive and forget rather than dwell on and hold grudges.

I will tell about one thing ...

A chain store brought in a replacement manager who we soon saw had some deep personal flaws, racism prime among them.
Several employees left.
The rest of us stayed.
And took notes and made reports.
And listened to customers confide their complaints in us.
And provided them with corporate contact info when asked.
And were eventually rewarded a few seasons later by watching the regional manager come in with a stranger and right in the middle of the sales floor announce to the manager, "Hello, Mr. _______, I'd like to introduce the new store manager."
Loved it!

I tried to get a job at Macy's once. I was rejected.

Perhaps it was my posture?

I worked in one of those pound shops once in the UK, the ones that aren't a chain and some random guy owns when I was like 18.

Worst decision ever, it was so stupid they literally just employed me to stand there and make sure people don't steal stuff and randomly tidy up the shelves, like what even was the point?

By the end of it they paid me £200 for 4 weekends worth of work which was a total rip off and pretended that someone stole stuff when it was them who stole stuff in order to sack a bunch of us.

Like I honestly have no idea what their plan was but it was proper dumb. I still cringe even now at how stupid it was.

One of my college jobs was in retail.  After a full year, I still did not have a raise.  The boss explained that retail jobs are considered temporary, and because his employees were not likely to stick around, he was not about to give them raises or promotions.  When I suggested that it might be the other way around, he suggested that I find work elsewhere.

I've done quite a few retail or customer service jobs. The worst however was working customer service at a call center. It's difficult enough dealing with customers who are unhappy because the product they ordered was damaged, broken or not what the expected. However, the company made it more stressful by putting time limits on calls. If your average call time was too high, you'd get written up. If your break times were over the limit, you could it written up. The calls were recorded and checked. If it was not perfectly handled, you could get written up. I lasted two months after training. By the I left, only 2 people from my training class of 20 people remained. The turnaround rate was extremely high, but the company did not care because they got money for creating "new jobs" all the time. I vowed never to work a call center again. It was the most stressfull job I ever had.

I worked for a few months in a store about 20k square feet. Not huge but not small either. The managers were OK but had their moments.

I disliked the whole by the book attitude. They were a stickler for rules and dealt with everything with the utmost of professionalism. It just didn't feel right to see two store managers in suits get into a military level of planning and seriousness over a handful of canned carrots. This type of stuff along with the politics of climbing the career ladder (yeah seriously in a shop, they somehow thought there was a "career" ladder to climb working in pound stretcher)

The place I work in now is a lot better. The engineers are down to earth. There is a clear hierarchy based on experience and qualifications, unlike shop work which has little in the way of qualifications to judge the best for the job so trampling on others for the top jobs becomes the norm.

It's nice when the managers and engineers ask the labourers for their opinion of the feasibility of doing a job in a particular method. "This is too thin to weld with this machine", "This can't be flipped with a crane", "This looks like it might collapse "