Long hours, a lot of which go unpaid and despite their 'policy' you will never see this time back in lieu (seriously senior management, allow people to take the time off, you're a hair away from a tribunal for breaking working time regs)
Senior management (regional and ops) setting unrealistic targets and not looking at stores on an individual basis, stores struggling to reach a target then then get bigger targets to work to. There is a bonus scheme, don't ever expect to see a penny of it, it's related to the un-achievable KPI's tied to your sales.
Senior managements (above store level) style of motivation is humiliation, more often than not via email, but conference calls and in person as well. Don't expect to be congratulated even when you do well. Head Office will recognise this as the effort of your regional manager, not you.
The slashing of store budgets in terms of hours means that store management (TL & SM) stay long after they should finish to get jobs done (POS changes being large and frequent)
Said POS changes from marketing are frequent, unnecessary and more often than not wrong, with you having to make changes at the last minute, as well as having to serve customers and deal with your own work load. If a store is expected to get things right first time, what about the marketing department?
If you're expecting a role in retail (which is a challenging market at the moment) to be hard, yet rewarding, look elsewhere, this is not a forward thinking business to work for and imagine the four stores they are closing to be the tip of the iceberg. They are approaching 21st century problems, with firmly 20th century ideas on not only how to keep the business afloat, but how to make it succeed.
