From what I've read, Mall-Wart is a lot like this, too.

Joyce

Helen Miles wrote:
.

Sounds a bit like MacDonald's. My neice worked for them when she was at
college and she told me that if you even slightly criticised the
company other workers would berate you. She did say sometimes it was
slightly creepy and almost cult like

This may explain the young couple who recently won the lottery and plan
to keep working at the Golden Arches because they love it so much, (I
was more scandalised to find that she was an area manager on £16K-
that is a pittance for any position but an area manager  ? That's
usually the Golden job in retail)

Since Mickey D's is a franchise, things like salary depend on the owner.  To
a very large extent so does the work culture.  Unless the area manager
worked for corporate, going around to check on individual franchises.  There
is precious little management involved in that.

My younger daughter has worked for McD since she was sixteen, with a few
stints at other places.  She now manages six stores and makes a very nice
living.  Has health insurance, owns a house, car is paid for, vacations,
etc.

It doesn't hurt that the guy she works for can afford to pay well and
prefers to leave the day to day operations to employees he can trust.

Jo

I used to work in bookselling and I miss it terribly. I never found
people to be that bad- there's maybe 1% who could put "Annoying
assistants" down as a hobby but even most what appeared to be rude
customers were okay once they got the message that you were there to
help them and happy to do so.

But it's like a friend of mine says, people want things cheap so costs
have to be cut and  a lot of people end up in shop jobs who haven't got
the temperament but are prepared to work long hours for bad wages.
Anyone who might be good at it either gets promoted into management
where they don't have customer contact or they soon get tired of
working for peanuts and get jobs in other industries (For example a
friend of mine is an assistant in an off-licence a job where he has to
work long hours, unsocial hours and runs the risk of being robbed,
stabbed or shot on a daily basis and he takes home less than half of
what I do)

A lot of the problem is also the perception of shop work as not for
intelligent people.I used to get annoyed when people said to me "But
you've got A levels. You're too good to work in a shop!" In fact I was
doing a highly skilled and immensly variable job, which I loved doing
and found a lot more challenging than what I'm doing now.

Lesley

Slave of the Fabulous Furballs