Zara reviews

Rostering was completely backwards, barely scraping through the Australian standards of weekends worked and weekends off. Ended up being more of a sales assistant than actually completing the job I was hired for. Early starts, late finishes (my average week was patterning between 7am and 11am starts, hardly enough time to sleep or have a social life). Very little wiggle room for your own needs and wants - ‘their way or the high way’. I left because I wasn’t able to take a weekend off to see my dying uncle because it was a “black out period” over Easter.

Some many. For starters, when I had my interview, I specifically asked if it was okay to start working the following weekend (then I would've broken up from uni for the holidays), which I was told was fine. As she was offering me the job on the phone a couple of hours later, she asked if I could work days I told her I couldn't. It being Christmas, I said it was fine for now. I attended an induction that same week and when they gave me my timetable, she'd put me in for shifts that week even though she told me I could start the following week. When I asked the manager who gave me the schedule, she just shrugged in a 'take it or leave it' gesture. I ended up missing the last week of school because I really needed the money. There was a time when someone changed my four hour shift to a six hour and didn't bother to contact me. I ended up being two hours late and while no one had a go at me for it because it wasn't my fault, that was still more money that I could've made if I'd known about it. The job itself is pretty physically demanding, there's a lot of cleaning and tidying which involves a lot of bending and running around. This part of the job didn't bother me, it's basic retail work but it's a lot more intense than other places I've worked for and they take their policies and everything really seriously. If you're on the closing shift, you are guaranteed to stay at least 15 minutes after your shift, picking up the slack of the day workers. Someone told me you get paid for overtime only if you stay longer than 30 minutes but someone else told me its 15 minutes - which makes it harder to calculate how much you'll be paid. The Zara I worked at didn't have an electronic clocking-in system so this was something I worried about. They don't ask people to stay later, they just expect it. My very first shift, people were telling me 'if you get a bus, speak to so-and-so and they might let you leave early' - even though my shift has already finished. Why do I need to argue with someone that I should leave on time? They don't make people stay later if their shift ends at 5pm. This is even worse if you're working behind the cash desk, don't expect to leave until really late because they calculate everything they've made at the end of the day. As this was Christmas time, the store was shutting at 11pm, meaning a closing shift lasts until 12am and I was always so anxious about catching the last bus. I found out that they weren't keeping me on when I saw the next month's rota (they didn't bother telling me) and I just quit.