Bad business to work in - Store Manager Crown Paints Employee Review

Staff levels. You have the bare minimum to run a store, and I do mean the bare minimum! most stores operate on 3, if your very lucky 4 staff including the branch manager. And these will not all be full time. if there is any sickness (which there is LOADS, I will come to this in my next point) you are in real trouble staffing the store. SICKNESS!!! From the second you enter the business you are entitled to 7 weeks full pay (yes this can be seen as a benefit but let me explain). As I have explained above you are given the bare minimum of staff. All of these staff are entitled to holiday (obviously) and most staff members look at this sickness almost like 7 weeks extra holiday so you almost always feel incredibly short staffed. And this happens in most stores. Since my time in the business (8 months) every member of my team had taken all of there holiday and all of the sickness. If I remember right I was fully staffed for about 2 weeks. You are constantly lone working because you don’t have the staff to man the store so you will find yourself almost switching with staff I.e when you start they finish. Unrealistic targets. The world is in a very tough place at the moment. (We all know this) but crown are still expecting to keep growing when almost no one is hitting the targets. They need to look at the business and realise the world is in a very precarious place and these expectations are not realistic, but they won’t. The new housing market is in a massive decline the country is in a resection new house sales are falling through but the company is still expecting you to sell more paint than the previous year. It’s not going to happen as even the big business do no need the paint as they cannot get the work. This bring me onto my next point. Bonuses. They are not really existent. You get paid these on a quarterly period. To get your bonus you must hit the target for all 3 months (remember how I explained no one is really hitting these) you also have to hit margins and other KPI’s which are slightly difficult to explain. So if somehow you manage to do almost the impossible and hit your target for all 3 months and did 105% of your target your would earn approx a massive £300 after tax for the whole quarter. I don’t mean to be disrespectful but I have earnt more commission than that in single sale in other jobs. The cold!! The shop I was working in had it’s heating condemned in the summer. By the time of leaving the business (now December) there is no heating in the shop at all. It was honestly warmer outside in the rain than it was inside. It was like working in a chiller! Customer would walk in and joke about how cold our shop was and that they could see their own breath. When I complained several times we was eventually sent a gas heater. This is something that could warm maybe a living room up but an entire warehouse?? On top of this written on all the cans of paint is to not store the paint below 8 degrees. Yet the shop is below this! When I originally had taken this job I was under the impression this is a company that very few people ever left. I had only been there 8 months and must have seen 3-4 managers come and go already and now I’m leaving another 4 are leaving also. Every staff member you speak to says how much they can’t stand working there. The company is after active sales people. they want you to call active accounts, dead accounts and cold call new customers but they don’t pay commission or bonuses so these people will never work here. The company needs to take a good look at what it expects and what the realistic expectations are.