Pros
I've worked in two co-ops, this review focuses on the one which I worked at for the longest (around 1.5yrs). I first started working at the co-operative food everything was great, even though at the interview I basically got told I had the job as soon as I gave my name and available hours. The pay was decent in relation to the work to begin with and I could work as much or as little as I liked. My colleagues seemed amiable, and my managers all seemed reasonable and respectable.
Cons
I didn't receive any training days etc, I was made to sign off for training that I did not receive and to sign " employee procedure contracts" to state that I fully understood processes/training that I never received, I tried to protest the first few times (I signed around 20 of these "contracts") but the manager made me feel as if I would be written up for refusing. These "contracts" were used as ammunition to discipline staff, no other reason, not to ensure a comprehensive level of training, but to make it easy for the management to throw the book at you. Since the first few weeks and up until the day I left, money was going missing from tills every week! Around £40-70 would be missing, and nobody would ever do anything about it. We had assigned tills and would have to declare all of our possessions before and after the shift - this did nothing. I would be lied to about the length of my shifts, managers would go back and edit rotas so that they could try to trick you into coming in on days off (I started taking a copy home on the release day to prevent this). I would sometimes be stood up at the kiosk for the entirety of an 8 hour shift, even when explicitly promised otherwise (i.e. that someone else would be in later to take me off later on) - complaints about ankle and shin pain from standing up for the duration were ignored. The first store manager I worked under (before leaving due to disability) never even knew who I was, I used to come in to shop on my days off and he'd speak to me as if I were just a customer. Towards the end of my time at co-op I was being consistently lied to by management, I was always asking for extra hours because mine had been cut back, I'd be told there weren't any going that week, and then later in the week I'd get a phone call asking me why I wasn't in work! I'd been assigned someone elses hours and then was told it was my fault for not checking rotas - even though I'd been told no extra hours were going. Managers did not communicate, one of my friends who was promoted to manager decided to step back down to superviser because he was actually making less money with more responsibilities and hours! I was commended on my work a grand total of twice during my employment, however, any time things went wrong I would be blamed regardless of the truth of the matter. For example, we started using two-way radios (there were about half as many radios as there were staff working because again, someone was stealing them) to call people to and from tills because the intercom had broken. My manager wrote me up for not responding to her on radio that she claimed she had given me at the beginning of my shift - she hadn't given it to me. I went into the back and it had been laying on a shelf for the duration, even after showing her her mistake I was still written up/disciplined. By the end I wasn't even being paid the full amount I'd worked, erroneous sick days and late starts on my payslip were incredibly common and the management would argue tooth and nail that you weren't in that day and that CCTV did not go back that far to prove it. We had thefts daily and no security to prevent it - the shop itself was falling apart, with doors having to be jammed open and shut (again presenting multiple risks) shelves were always half full (I was asked on several occasions if we were closing down; I wished!). Lastly, and most shockingly, presenting any individual initiative was met with contempt, I learned this very early on - any ideas I had about the store and improvements we could make were ignored. I was never informed of the complaints procedure for employees, I could never find out how to log on the co-op employees' page. Whenever I asked about taking complaints higher up I was met with animosity, I was worried that they would force me out of my job if I complained to HR. Given everything that went on there, I never had any real faith that employee complaints would be taken seriously - so well done on that, the work environment pushed me to the point of feeling weighed down and unable air my frustrations. At one point my managers "accidentally" changed my CITRUS password without my knowledge so my account had to be reset.
