Halfords: worst High St shop in the UK (survey), closely followed by WH Smith

I am so disappointed House of Fraser hasn't made the shit list. I used to work there and Saturdays were terrifying as the store filled to the brim with furious customers.

The record/CD market is gone. Books/magazines and newspapers (sorry Trots) have, at most, 5 years left as a volume market I reckon. Bigger shops like Office Depot do stationery better so what's the point of WHS?

Nude Scientist.....

They wont get thuled again.....

The 'apprenticeships' are bullshit.

Nah, I was on about Morrisons. Their recent initiative.

Are you organised/unionised? That really looks like fraud. If it's just a few stores then you have to balance the risk of being victimised, but if it's widespread it would be well worth kicking up a big stink over.

i am a member of useless seven days a week fwiw

i worked for WH Smith for a while. It was a nightmare, the managers were complete Thatcherite twats, they were bullying and docking pay and all sorts of naughtiness. Fuck em.

I was trained in this when I worked for them. I enjoyed it. Rule One was: middle-aged men in suits are bastards for nicking stuff. And get really really shirty when caught. I loved catching the fuckers.

Simple.
All the sensible, rational systems they had in place up until the late '90s, such as the book "special order" system where you priority-ordered direct from the publisher, were exchanged for electronic systems. In the case of "special order" books, that means that your order doesn't get made straight away by phone (as it used to be), but gets transmitted to the WH Smith central warehouse at Swindon instead, where they will hold the order until they have an order deemed sufficiently large to trouble the publisher with (for which read "that maximises the discount WHS get"). This means the book gets sent to Swindon, then on to the branch, all of which adds time, and then you have to rely on the staff not losing the bloody thing.
Add to this that staff used to be departmentalised, and had to learn the stock-lines for their dept, and follow the layout procedures for stock to the letter (which meant you knew exactly where to point a customer who wanted a particular item), now 70% of the (reduced) staff are "free-floating. They don't learn about the stock (unless they use their own time to do so), just how to operate a till and fill shelves.

Huge positioning advantage "on the high street", plus their wholesale side helps prop up retail.

They started going down the crapper in the late '80s, after the not very well-respected Simon Hornby had burned the company's fingers on a load of useless acquisitions. They decided to play a close game after that, on the principle of "look after the pennies, and the pounds look after themselves". Unfortunately, that doesn't work on a busy shop-floor, but they don't seem to have learned that lesson yet.