The culture of this business is insanely toxic. Nothing new for a cut throat industry like UK food retail of course, but at Co-op Group it's unique as it manifests in the most bizarre way. Unlike competitors, it seems like it's not by design but incompetence (I mean this as a compliment). The less sceptical side of me feels that it's genuinely not even known about by the senior leadership team. Although I note that a CEO who seemed to genuinely want to change the business appears to have unfairly fallen victim to this bizarrely powerful clique herself for daring to want to disrupt the status quo.
Unlike many of the younger managers in the business, I am quite long in the tooth (in convenience retail and apprentice terms anyway). I know the industry well, I've done bigger roles, and I know the game. Sadly, that also means I'm trapped within it, even if I get round to finishing my degree in the end.
You can forget living and dying by the sword as with typical competitor Store Manager roles, as at Co-op you don't have the chance. You're pretty much the least influential person in the entire business. A part-timer on 8 hours per week has more power and influence than you.
The role is degrading. Your job is pretty much to work for those above and below you. No matter what the hours or impact on you personally. You can't change anything, you just have to keep a shop open at the expense of your health. I could just not give a damn like many in the business, but I'm just not built that way. I want to take pride in my work like I have done all my career. But you're not given the room or dignity here.
The business likes to dictate what you should be doing, and when you should be doing it. Only the problem is that it doesn't work and you're the one left carrying the baby. The business does the same things every day and expects a different result. When things go wrong, they just cut some payroll from stores. And we're not talking about typical food retail efficiency here, we're talking about blunt top down austerity.
Recently, for example, they've decided (rightly so) that they were spending a fortune on supported placement hours in stores. There was no supporting process for cutting this however. If you did what you were told and have been an inclusive manager giving disabled people a chance and supporting people with reasonable adjustments, you'll now be punished. Just a single, short communication saying we're cutting hundreds of hours, you can't break the equality act, so tough rocks pretty much.
These comms are always like this. A central vanity project or some store you've never heard of has won a crumpet sales incentive, you'll get loads of info and people who you can contact. If it's bad news, short and sharp, go away and speak to your boss. Deflectionary and lacking information.
That's because what they're effectively doing is just saying there is no solution, go away, work harder. Just "comply" (not complain might I add). No solutions. No process. No guidance. Just Speak to your Area Manager.
They love compliance. So do many supermarkets. Only at least for other retailers accountability is shifted. At Co-op, it isn't.
They've spent millions on an AI ML labour optimisation engine, dumped a Digital Taylorist operating model on it, and somehow thought this would work. In fact, they're so detached they still do! There have been managers (including myself) who have spent overnight at home trying to manually fight with schedules to keep their stores operating. Hundreds of colleagues for months excluded because they didn't happen to be fortunate enough to own a personal mobile phone that was new enough (a Cooperative society shifting the cost of capital to some of its poorest employees). A job that used to take a manager an hour every week, that should have (and could easily have been) fully automised, can now take the best part of a day! And not any day, a very specific day (which happens to be my apprenticeship day). Yet centrally they're patting themselves on the back for a job well done! Thanks!
From catastrophic supply chain, to IT failings, you're just left to deal with the fallout. You have no autonomy to save money. No scope whatsoever to push trade. Pop outside to get something from your car and get assaulted and they come in and investigate you. You see things unfold, knowing you're going to be the one who has to put the hours in to deal with it. You can't just worry about what's in your control as the digital surveillance is so extreme you have none, yet mysteriously all falls silent when you're the one grafting away keeping the business trading.
There isn't anywhere to turn to either. They feel it's important to spoon feed you with a rigidly monitored system that saps your time away as if you're some sort of moron who doesn't know how to fill a shelf. But something too tough they don't have the answers for, like how to make the only colleague on with you with disabilities as productive as a fully abled colleague and you're just told to speak to your area manager (so basically dumped on them too) who "will visit your store and review your processes". Basically, go away and if you complain we'll send people in to tell you how rubbish you are. Insulting.
As if all their slow and ancient beurocratic practices are efficient anyway. The truth is with over 200 operational hours removed, we've never spent so much time away from performing value adding activities. If you're not fighting a misused scheduling system, you're at a meeting or on a conference call having instructions re-read to you as if you're not perfectly capable of reading them yourself. Or clicking dozens of tasks and critical paths sent to you so they can digitally monitor your every move. I kid you not, they even dictate when you can talk to people through "colleague conversations". An actual process for talking to your people!
This isn't just your typical SM grumbling about tight hours, unsociable working, and "ivory tower" complaints. In this industry, I know what the score. The hours and nature of the industry aren't the problem here. It's how powerless you are. Every hour of every day is dictated to you. This is the problem when a business does not know the difference between efficiency and austerity. Strip everything back and I can deliver. But whilst I'm dictated to and digitally monitored at all times in a business that still stores stock on stationary racking and promotes loose stock replenishment as if it's still the 1970's?
You can't do anything about colleague disabilities, their flexibility, or even manage performance without having to phone an ER number to ask for permission, who then just tell you they think you're being a meanie with a disciplinary and grievance procedure that's engineered as if the business is some sort of charity. Thanks for that, I'll just work all the horrid shifts myself for free shall I at the expense of my own health and family commitments? Clearly I'm not a colleague in your employ who is at all important then?
Product availability isn't important, but pressing "the right answer" and ensuring you take 15 seconds or more between each one on an app is. Neither is controlling waste - throw away as much food as you like just make sure you do it at the right time exactly when told to. 3% stock loss is fine by Co-op, as long as you press some buttons at the right time on a Sunday - and ONLY a Sunday as that extra stuff you did to actually save money isn't monitored. You can spend as much payroll as you like too, just make sure it's not productive hours. If a neighbouring store spends 5 hours less on productive hours whilst 20% of their team are on the sick and 200 hours on holiday and then replaces the lot with overtime that's ok. Manage this well and use a couple of productive hours more and you're a villain, despite the fact you've spent £1,000s less.
Even trade is managed this way. It's all about "compliance". The empty fruit and veg and weeds in the car park clearly aren't an issue, it's the fact your Salt and Vinegar Pringles have 5 facings and your Sour Cream ones 4 on the promotion end when it's supposed to be the other way round. It's heartbreaking. You're ashamed of your store every single day, getting battered by customers for it, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're actively discouraged from doing so anyway, it's just about compliance to inefficient, beurocratic, and broken processes.
The most chilling part of this culture is evidenced in what comes next. As if being monitored digitally on where you put stock via yet another over engineered surveillance technology isn't Orwellian enough, they're developing headsets that will dictate orders centrally from Manchester direct into each person's ear. I'm not sure where human dignity goes from there.
Despite claims to the contrary, there is no one to go to with this. Head Office is guarded by a ring of steel. You can't even call them anymore, communications are mostly one way. You can log the odd digital ticket (provided you own a new enough personal device to authenticate access), but you're basically just told things like "the operating model cannot be changed". There's feedback forums but these are so heavily triaged through multiple layers, they pretty much pick and choose what to respond to. The annual employee survey is Likert based and only asks the questions they want answers to, and engineered in such a way that they mainly apportion blame locally - and as Co-op is a business reliant on appeasement to maintain PR facades, these surveys pretty much serve as yet another monitoring and "blame the manager" device. There's barriers everywhere, and after over 5 years service I haven't met anyone with any kind of autonomy and this is openly admitted.
So you find yourself being dictated to by a barrage of one way central instructions, and the people that work for you. Co-op is unique in this way, as although autocracy is present within the industry, I've never before been in a position where contributing anything positive to the business is actively punished, yet you pretty much work for the people in your employ. I've never felt so degraded. You have to comply with central dictates, whilst ensuring you bend over backwards to make all your people happy. Working all the shifts no one wants to do, doing all the jobs no one wants to do. Basically a salary paid slave to those on either side of you, with no voice, no autonomy, and no control.
I've never been in a position in my career where I've delivered so much and been so undervalued. No one even notices. That's the difference between here and working for other retailers. Add on top a Degree Apprenticeship that no one but me seems to care about and for the first time in my entire career, I burnt out and became extremely unwell.
Despite balancing the demands of the business with raising a family, I've somehow managed to earn enough credits for a First Class degree. But right through the process, it's been like it's never existed. I've always been treated the same as a full time manager, and a few hours worth of Customer Assistant hours (not management ones) being added to a store that's lost around 100+ in that time hasn't really done anything. What's supposed to be an apprenticeship has been treated as if it's some sort of inconvenience to the business. It makes me wonder why they even bothered? No one will likely notice, as all that's likely to change once it's over is that at least I won't have this commitment alongside the 16 hour shifts, late nights into early mornings, and mentally draining graft and chaos anymore.
There'll be no job other than the one I'm doing after this by the way as another unique thing about Co-op is this really weird approach to inner circle networking. This is far beyond "who you know" and "jobs for the boys" kind of stuff. You're practically invisible in this business, and even if you weren't there's pretty much nothing you can do to excel at anything anyway as you're not allowed to do anything. You just go to work for a load of hours, do what you're told, graft, do whatever it takes to keep your store open no matter what the personal cost is, and that's it. Store Managers are just annoying cost lines, hugely undervalued, seen as unimportant, and there's almost an excitement when one leaves as they'll just get the manager from a neighbouring store to cover both with no pay rise. They're not even bothered if a store crumbles (I have never worked for a business that is so casual about stores just closing if they can't be covered. Sometimes they even close them themselves just to do small install tasks!).
I've worked for extreme, cut throat, and downright nasty businesses over a career spanning nearly 3 decades. It's UK food retail, it's part of the job. Yet a few years with a cooperative society and I burn out to the point where I've become unable to work for some months. Not through choice, I genuinely couldn't. Like many food retail managers, I've been to the edge many times at the hands of ruthless competitors. Yet a few years with a business that's a Cooperative society in name only and I reach a stage where I didn't even know what day of the week it was any more?
No snow storm, operation, bereavement, or bout of flu keeps me away from work. Without being productive, life of meaningless. But this period of health decline has been so scary, I can't think of any alternative but to get out as soon as I can and pay the university myself to mark my dissertation so I at least get my degree accredited. Unfortunately, as I've been in this industry for too long my prospects of escaping it looks slim unlike younger managers (no one wants a middle aged supermarket manager other than supermarkets), but at least I'd have more human dignity delivering the Ubers for a while instead of picking them.
And you know what? When I do leave, hardly anyone will even notice. A store manager at Co-op is basically an invisible supply of flexible free labour, so undervalued by the business we're viewed as an irritating cost line to be eliminated as soon as possible.
Let this serve as a warning to anyone thinking of jumping to this business. It may seem cushy for a while (do a rubbish job and they don't even notice), but how little you mean to the business will eventually bite hard, and you'll be left with no life, no dignity, and grafting the same unsociable shifts with only a headset and handheld terminal screaming one way demands at you. At least competitors will pay you more for this.
