Saturday 3 February 2007

Jonathan's Story

good morning ladies and gents!
this is jonathan's story (yep, two jon's in two days!) a 19 year old disgruntled CA on the wonderful section that is produce. keep 'em coming, folks!


A view from a 19 year old at the bottom of the food chain and leaving soon:

Hello I'm Jon. I'm 19 and work as a customer assistant on produce. I don't have a lot to complain about in all honestly but I do enjoy a rant about every other section apart from those on produce (who doesn’t).
My team (produce) is awesome, my manager is laid back, my team leader is a legend, and have two pretty good mates on the section the same age. However it’s the rest of the store that pisses me off, we on produce seem to have to work bloody harder than everyone else in my opinion. I've only been working at Tesco since July but I know that last year they were earning (produce sales) £70,000 a week then before Christmas and since I’ve been there we've been on £88,000 and after Christmas we've been making £100,000 on produce a week (its a pretty small store) which means we have stupidly small chillier that cannot handle the stock we’ve been getting but that’s our problem, not the fault of whoever is ordering in stupid quantities of frigging figs. And yet they want the waste figures to be the same as when we were earning £70,000 which is impossible plus even though we’re clearly busting a gut we still get a right old bollocking when we're caught talking to each other while the bloody dot com pickers swan about the isles constantly in the way moaning about everything and destroying the whole shop floor to find the perfect apple. That annoys me, fair enough find 'the perfect apple' but at least don’t leave a half full tray of apples in the middle of the shop floor, its like dropping chewing gum on the floor because we pay taxes so that the council can pay someone whose job it is to remove it. Another thing that annoys me is how the cleaners are always on a crusade to run you down when they're using the orange cleanly things.
The till team leaders always assume we should stop everything to deal with there “one manky orange” even though they are trained and told to do waste it themselves and we’ve even got a special tray for them on the shop floor, that annoys me because they’re lazy. Provisions (meat and dairy) seem to have an army of workers and then like 3-5 part timers every night covering the full timers lousy shifts, which isn’t cricket and also even though they have so many they’re constantly in the shit with half the store having to help them out while when we’re in a spot of bother (because of absences) no one ever helps us, why is that? Doing 1-10’s annoys me mainly because I have to still be there when everyone else from my section goes home at 6 but also because we’re the only section that seems to have anyone on till 10 which means we have to cover bread, bakery and some times meat and dairy, which is annoying. I/ we on produce get on fairly well with the backdoor lot apart from one guy that seems hell bent on calling everyone a dooshbag, which is extremely witty. However its seems to be pretty much the rest of the store that annoys me and I should think I probably annoy the hell out of the rest of the store too but I don’t mind that so much, because I’m working so much harder than people on other departments, obviously. Oh and some people do not understand sarcasm at all or have any humour which makes the day go slower.
Customers are the worst, especially when they blame us for the hole in their bag, god knows why they think we make the bags. Another reason why customers are bad is because they’re always around when your slagging them off and have an extremely big husband. I could ramble on a lot longer but I shant, I would imagine if you don’t work on produce you’ll disagree with pretty much with everything I said, but that’s the point, in my store your raised to hate every other section in the store and compete with them to be the best (well I don’t know if that’s what other sections do, but we sure as hell want to be doing better than anyone else then complain about the fact that we are because of our natural ability of greatness and not because we have a 1000 people helping us out.)
Anyway I have two weeks left before I leave for Japan, however I have massive respect for anyone that works there with no end of leaving in sight, that is mental.

1 comment:

Enzo21 said...

Hahahaha, that sounds so familiar. I worked on Produce for 3 years before moving onto to stock control. It always seemed no matter how hard you worked and how much you knocked your pan out to get things done, there was always something left for the Boss to moan about or put you down on. I used to work weekends days and lates, and no matter how short staffed we were Provisions, Bakery, Checkouts always needed a dig out even with a bloody army of folk working those depts. I thought Stock Control would be a cushier number, but, now im on my own trying to organise and controll 9 fresh departments, getting a mountain of pressure from everyone from CA's to the Store Manager, i realise the grass isn't necessarily always greener on the other side. Sometimes i miss the bad old days working in Produce. At least then i had folk i could gripe with.