Pros
Some of the shop floor staff were lovely.
Cons
Managers are deeply unpleasant. There are some people who just shouldn't be managers- a huge part of running a store is having responsibility and duty of care for your staff, but they have problems with every staff member for one reason or another, seemingly just for the sake of it. They are bullies, and it's about profit over people every time. When staff would bring up legitimate concerns I saw managers wait until they left the conversation to moan about them and even flip them off behind their back as they walked away. After one young girl raised concerns about a male customer being inappropriate with her (an individual who had previously followed her home, so pretty serious) nothing more was done but to say it was probably her own fault "because of the way she dresses". No one even spoke to her to see if she was OK. I was also told that they only hired a regular customer with learning difficulties as a Christmas temp because the staff didn't want them to, but they wanted to "punish" them and "make them feel awkward" (a direct quote). Managers would deliberately seek out ways to make staff feel uncomfortable at work, just because. Absolutely everything at Superdrug is about sales and profit. This shouldn't be surprising in a retail environment but there was no balance at all between this and staff care or customer service. The town centre store has such a horrible negative atmosphere because the mostly young staff are bullied. They are bullied over headsets in full earshot of the whole team if they haven't sold enough beauty cards, sim cards or star buys (which change every week but no one has time to train staff on the new products anyway). The till sales process is ridiculous and does not actually work, it only serves to make both staff and customers uncomfortable so it's a wonder why superdrug are so concerned with keeping this practice up. Each store is allocated a certain amount of hours per week which is nowhere near enough to get the job done, yet staff are penalised when jobs aren't finished. The contract was for 40 hours but as management you would be expected to work well over that for no overtime pay. I was told if I had the audacity to take the full hour lunch break I was entitled to that it would be noted and that I'd need to stay later. I was suddenly put down for a 12 hour shift the next day without warning, then they justify it by saying "we do expect a lot from our staff". They expect everyone to live and breathe superdrug. Area managers and managers are best mates and have known each other for yours so don't expect any help when raising your concerns. The whole comoany is a shambles and everyone is miserable. Avoid.