Does anyone here work in a Virgin Megastore?
And if so, do you feel as though you're treated like a piece of shit as well?
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i don't
but a friend of mine does. And yes, he'd probably echo that sentiment.
!
I've worked in HMVs and I bet you it's worse there.
come on
let's all refer to it as the slag megastore.
i understand your depression anyway. i'd hate to have people asking where they could find the mcfly album or my chemical romance dolls.
dolls!?
hahaha
Get
another job?
best bandname ever:
Virgin Mega Whore.
shame they got sued.
bah
and there was me thinking branson was supposed to be nice to his employees
illusion shattered :(
why
is it a bad place to work? I don't think Branson owns Vigin Megastores. (may be wrong tho)
don't matter
it's all part of the supposed virgin brand and what it represents which if you add in virgin radio seems to add up to a big fuck all.
Actually,
I work in a virgin megastore. But, unfortunately, as a consequence of this, I am far to apathetic to post an opinion one way or another...
However, my ass does strangely hurt at the end of each day... hmmm...
working in virgin is shit..
..and is getting shitter. Im really begining to despise a job i once enjoyed
dont
work at oxford street do you, perchance? we should go for a drink sometime - i'm an alcoholic donchaknow...
okay so
looks like i won't apply to work in virgin when i go job hunting next
No do not!
I worked there about 3. years ago. Pay was crap. They hated mates visiting. AND they wanted me to cut off my dreads!!
i thought quirky hair was encouraged?
I used to
But then our shop closed down and i lost my job. They did, however keep paying me for 2 months afterwards and never asked for it back. Im not complaining, it funded many drunken nights out, and for that, i love virgin.
yep...
it is getting shitter. first they take away our breaks, then they lower our discount for no reason. then they really fucking nag us to behave like robots to the customers. it's ok, i handed in my notice this morning. and yes, branson does still own the megastores. and no, he has no involvement whatsoever with the company. except for shitty christmas cards with bad beard jokes. if it was directed at me, i don't work at the oxford street one. i'm always near there though, and strangely enough i'materriblealcoholictoo...coincedence!
personally
i'm surprised you can afford to be alcoholics on virgin's wages!
i spent several christmases in one
and it wasn't a brilliant place to work, but mostly because the pay was horrendous (minimum-wage-tastic!) and the customers were all bastards. But I worked with some good people, and we didn't have to work THAT HARD.
Apparently HMV have better pay, better discount but you're expected to work a lot harder. Probably why they're beating Virgin into the ground..
i don't want to sound like i'm defending them
but Virgin i believe are catching up with HMV, who had their worst christmas ever. i'm not surprised. hmv stores are horrid. but yeah, we're expected to work hard these days. a horrendous set of guidelines under the name of 'Virgin Vitals'.
Did you greet every customer within two minutes of them entering the store with the correct Virgin greeting?
Did you offer to lick their balls?
If not, why not?
no
because i worked in the stock room :D
HMV
is heller expensive though
I find generally HMV has the better selection
though this may be just my local ones.
I used to work in the V Shop
in Clapham Junction.
It was lots of fun, until they introduced a policy of only playing 'Now That's What I Call CHART DANCE' or similar, after an incident involving 'Bad Babysitter', and then it was shit.
i worked in a V Shop as well
it was horrible. our manager was a nasty little troll man (and the world's leading authority on Led Zepplin) and we were supposed to work for half an hour every night cleaning the shop after close. Except we didn't get paid for it. Except everyone went along with it.
I got fired after two months for being "customer unfriendly".
oh no, nasty led zep man?
is he the one that has written about four million books on them? he's an awful cunt.
yes!
that's the one. He's a horrible little man, an absolute troll of a human being. last i heard of him, when the Bedford V-Shop was sold off (he was it's manager for about 20 years) he weaseled a job at the Milton Keynes megastore, which THANKFULLY was about three weeks after I left.
his name wasn't Dave Smith was it?
Or is that someone else? I just can't remember the bloke's name...
Yeah, that was him.
More frequently referred to as Dave the Troll. How did you come into contact with the unpleasant little man?
OH NO, HE'S AN UTTER CUNT
I had to deal with him on the phone once because my incompetent store manager hadn't done something he said he would have done. He was by far the rudest, most unpleasant person i've ever spoken to within Virgin Retail. He was mean to me.
sounds about right
he spent weeks telling me i was "lazy" and needed to "shape up", and then fired me telling me it was just a case of "it not being the job for me".
hilarity.
I did
about 5 years ago... I got a reward from a credit card company for being great. Branson took it off me for his money mountain. Pay was awful, red never suited me, always kept late unpaid, the metal section stank. Enough?
urgh, the uniforms!
the milton keynes ones had cows on them, because management thought "Milton Keynes.. what do people associate with Milton Keynes? CONCRETE COWS!". bastards.
Girl
Also, I was the only girl that worked there, and from what I could make out, HAD EVER worked there.
I was, therefore, treated with a mixture of wonder and suspicion.
I quite like it.
ladies
when I was at megastore oxford st, there were a couple of hundred boys and about 5 girls. It was fab. I had 2 proposals :-) I've never smiled so much before in my life.
hmmm,
i did fall in love with a girl last time i was at the oxford street store. we talked about sigur ros and i slipped one in*
*may or may not be true
Boys
HMV does tend to have a lot cuter boys than Virgin, at least on Oxford St.
Why is this? WHY?
you think?
the guys who served me the other week were fat and greasy.
*high five of sympathy*
I used to work at Oxford Street. Virgin Vitals? ... Can't think of a funny enough pun for that, perhaps because IT ISN'T FUNNY IN ANY WAY. Cunts.
I quit because I went slightly insane by the way, I don't think I will ever quite recover. It attracts dickheads as well, some of the people who work there think they are THE SHIT. Cunts.
And it's not that hard to be an alcoholic on their wages if you want to keep your sanity, just eat less. And drink at Samuel Smiths' pubs. Cunts.
Virgin Vitals?
Yeah, it's a bit gay. Although have you seen the new one?
I can't remember what it's an acronym for but it's B.R.A.V.E.
And it's equally gash.
Me and my mate had this idea where once we'd quit, we'd put our Virgin shirts on and go around all the stores in London. We'd floorwalk and whenever mean/stupid/ignorant people asked us for help we'd say all the things we've wanted to say for years. See how long it would take for us to get kicked out. It would be ace.
The girls in HMV are cuter too
I briefly had a massive schoolboy-like crush on a girl who worked in one of the Oxford Street HMVs. When I took my copy of The Beat That My Heart Skipped to her to pay for it, our eyes met and she told me it was one of her favourite films and I wrote down that she had to watch Morvern Callar on a store card and made her promise to buy it. My heart was hers then, but only briefly as I had to go and meet my girlfriend. Said girlfriend promptly cheated on me and dumped me and I never saw miss HMV 2006 again.
If only I could find that tiny violin through the tears....
Here's an outsider's perspective
I used to work in a Tesco store, when I was doing my A levels. For a long time afterwards, I couldn't see them in the same way - you walk in to shop and it seems OK, yet as a member of staff you were treated so badly ... even if you worked hard (as I did).
But Virgin Megastores always seemed different, in keeping with the whole Virgin philosophy. Until relatively recently. When I've been to them in recent years, it looks as though it's not the organisation that's bad, but that you've got a few people in supervisor/team leader positions doing what people who get that level of role in any organisation do - that is, getting a false sense of self-importance, patronising colleagues and talking to them like dirt.
So in a nutshell, as an outsider it seems like this: organisation OK, staff one rung off the bottom not OK. Is that a fair assessment?
to be honest
i had no real problem with the staff in our branch - everyone, even the managers, were all nice. we were on first name terms with everyone up to the store manager, it was nice.
the problems arose because of ridiculous head office decisions. the best one i could think of was when i was there they trialled this new way to receive stock. previously, stock would be ordered from the distributors partly centrally (mostly chart / new release titles) and by the store itself (anything else), and the stock would be delivered direct to the store from the distros.
the second christmas i worked there, they decided to sweep the first one away. the entire operation was subcontracted to another company, who would order chart titles on our behalf and then sent them on to us, and each box would have barcode. we could then scan the barcode, and it would tell the stock system what was in the box without the need for us to manually count everything.
fine idea in practise, but the company they subcontracted to were, predictably, beyond useless and the amount that was supposed to be there never was, but we were told by head office that we must just scan the boxes and under no circumstances were stock counts to be done.
consequently, the company paid for a load of stock it never received (god knows where it ended up) and all the store's numbers were out, which made everyone's job far more difficult.
not really
You're right about the self-importance and rudeness aspect, but the organisation can be appalling as well. I understand they've a lot to do but the amount of times we've been sent wildly incorrect POS, retarded workmen who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing, and other general things are too many to count. There are a lot of really lovely people about but nothing ever seemed to go as it was supposed to. They'd give us a day's notice that our refit was the following day etc etc.
One that still makes me laugh was when they invested a HUGE sum of money in scaling out these little handheld gadgets to take care of inventory within stores.
They didn't work. They were impossibly complicated to use and the company ended up losing a huge amount of money on them.
Am i going to get sued for this thread?
haha
^^^^^^^^see my post above yours!
Going in in disguise
Brilliant idea. My last few days there were extremely pleasureable. I was never the best CSA (ARG!) but I had perfected the sideways glance into full on stare into pregnant pause into WHAT? thing when asked when the Kaiser Chiefs album was coming out or why the rock section wasn't in alphabetical order (foreign people couldn't understand the surname thing). It made people feel silly for asking silly questions. They deserve nothing less.
I had a man screaming at me about how rude I was once too. Good times.
guntrip if you ain't worked DA FLOOR ya gots no idea how shit it really is. Where's the James Blunt album 100000 times a day can make you feel a new level of depression.
Agreed on the self-importance of managers though. They're only in that position because they've worked there for so long. I'd rather die than reach such levels of promotion.
This is cathartic.
YES!
I do that too. I was asked yesterday where the Arctic Monkeys album was. I proceeded to walk the lady around the store showing her every single location it was in. Small store. About ten different places, including a huge drop of it RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU WHEN YOU WALK IN.
There was a teenage girl in the urban section i overheard shouting in dismay to her mother "Let's go to HMV, this isn't even in alphabetical order!"
?!
[i]Agreed on the self-importance of managers though. They're only in that position because they've worked there for so long. I'd rather die than reach such levels of promotion.[/i]
Yes! And they all become friends, and do each other favours/ignore wrongdoings between themselves etc. Nepotism innit.
new to virgin...
I've been working ina large store for a few weeks now and id have to agree with the managerial comments. there are a few of these 'senior sales' guys that walk around with their noses stuck up in the air like their god or something, makes me laugh. The best bit is when i got a slapped wrist and was spoken to very rudely today for taking my lunch five minutes early, i was going by the till clock and not the computer clock which was apparantly wrong...talk about a pathetic power trip, it was like he had been waiting for an apportunity to confirm his status for months, haha i swear if i wasnt in work i would have slapped the guy. anyway bitch over.
not all senoir sales are that bad
well i wasn't. i've worked on of for virgin. Got offered Assistant manager in Falkirk last month, yet this month got fired for grosse misconduct with no evidence to back there claims, there just cunts angry that i turned down there shit job. Ah well out of it all now. Used to work in an indie store so i think that made me hate the virgin way a lot more.
i so forgot about this thread.
how cathartic it was!
Yeah...
Anyway... off to work!...
I'm sure HMV is just
as bad. At HMV we had to do team building excercises and complete pointless work books and sing 'yay for HMV' and all that crap. *shudder*
At Virgin Megastore
it’s a daily up hill struggle to put in place the random, unethical and borderline ridiculous ideas our lord almighty Simon Douglas has thought up on that particular month. All of which I am sure have made no difference in the business moving from the ultimate goal of “From Red To Black!”. This month it’s “Range Is King!” Where stores are removing masses of good titles to leave simply just Chart, New Release, Best Of’s and the types of albums everyone already has in there collection! Don’t head to Virgin Megastore if you want anything fresh or exciting! You will be greeted by a mechanical staff member who will roll out the same scripted dialogue as for every other customer that walks through the door. The enquiry will inevitably end “We don’t have it in stock! But we offer a free home delivery service!” Passion for product has dissolved with every generic title racked in the store. The days of coming into our store and spending time searching for something special to purchase are well and truly over! I find it hard as a manager to see the difference between stacking shelves at Sainsburys or racking stock for Virgin Megastore. Knowledge of product is no longer necessary. It may as well be frozen peas your dealing with. If you no nothing about film or music, Virgin Megastore is the career for you!
a managers perspective
Thing is being a manager for Virgin is no cake walk either, having to deal with Head Offices latest brainwaves which are usually so store unfriendly having been dreamed up by some dweeb from HO who's never been anywhere near a customer. Plus if you work for the company long enough you see the same 'new' ideas being rolled out again and again but as soon as head office staff are replaced the old ideas come back again rehashed as the latest new thinking.
It's so hard to remain enthusiastic about product as well when buying bans prevent the store from having a respectable offer, it's incredibly frustrating and embarrassing when you can't take a customer to the rock/pop section and can't guarantee to be able to put into the customers hand 'Nevermind' or 'Otis Blue'.
The hardest thing about being a manager is staff turnover and maintaining staff morale. Even with the best recruitment procedures put in place and the best candidates recruited the reality is that you ain't going to get top people for £5.50 an hour. What you do get are young people looking for an 'exciting' job involved with music and multimedia, who think that working for the the big V is going to be like working in Championship vinyl or Empire Records or some other make believe universe where you stand around all day not doing much and talk about whats cool and whats not. I've hired some amazing young people in the past, have tried to induct and enthuse them as much as possible, give them responsibility, guidance, praise where it's due just to watch them become cynical and lazy over time. You get the odd one or two who have an amazing work ethic and these are the ones who go on to be the managers of the future but most CSA's give up trying after a year or two and then they start slagging off the poor old managers who are just trying to pay their mortgages and keep afloat on their crappy wages.
So if anyone is thinking of applying for a job in a megastore or similar this Christmas be aware that it will be hard bloody work, poorly paid and not at all glamorous, but most of all don't think all managers are evil scumbags out to get you, they were probably once pimply faced music freaks the same as you when they started. It's just they got sucked into the machine ever destined to wind up becoming trolls or headed for a nervous breakdown. Beware!!!
WOW!
I'm feeling some real Virgin Manager love from the two guys (girls?) above who have a total of two posts between them...
Hey, I find it hard being a Virgin Manager too, but [abandons post]
Ha, feel that love, or is it nostalgia?
I'm lucky I escaped the system and no longer work for the bearded one.
If only
I came across this thread when it started, I left a Virgin Megastore in January this year. Since then I have had problems with Virgin Media as well. Fun fun..
'troll'
is definitely the word i would use to describe my old v shop manager :D
'troll'
I think I know the Troll you mean
Jeeeeeeeeeeesus, kids...
I'm on fuckin' holiday here! Stop talking Virgin immediately. I only get, like, 38 days holiday a year - because they made all the bank holidays normal working days and [abandons post]
hahahahah
i worked at the milton keynes branch over two christmases. we were open both boxing days, one of only 3 or 4 shops in MK to bother.
we had a choice of either working boxing day or new years day. both years, i said boxing day and the "unfortunately" found out there was no public transport then, so i got both off :D
dave the troll/c*unt
led zeppelin afficionado/all-round nasty man?
:D
he fired my ass as well. oh dear..
Ooops, sorry Otis
Just re-read my post, you wouldn't be looking for 'Otis Blue' in RP, at least not in my day, the sleevechecking may have gone down hill a bit since then!!!!
I've been working wekeends at one for nearly 2 years
If I wasn't so reliant on working so I can paysthe rent while Im at Uni, I'd be out of there in a shot, I've been moved upto senior sales and it's just the same shit as everyone else gets. they've moved out whole shop layout TWICE within 12 months, on top of all the usual shit too!
I hate
hate
hate them!