@Chrispydelic 554651 wrote:
I got knocked back on a temporary job by fucking Tesco’s. What the fucking, flying fiery fuck?
large companies, especially those who might be profitable but have poor reputations usuallly do not employ people they consider to be too intelligent or overqualified (even if they have previous retail experience), as they consider them to be a greater security risk; there are precedents of intelligent folk getting temp jobs in a company they hate as a way of gaining info to steal high value items or commercial secrets and/or pass them on to competitors or activist groups.
As a teenager in the 1980s I was unable to get a weekend job at the main part of Tescos, yet managed to get a higher paid one selling cigarettes from the kiosk at the front of the same store (these were run by a separate company). I suspect this happened simply because the logistics were more complex than they seem- there were many different brands of cigarettes, sold in various unit sizes and at prices which varied by a few pence, it was very busy and you had to have some skills to correctly operate the cash register (there was no barcode scanning then), pick out the correct brand and quantity and if these had sold out or been discontinued convince those customers (usually elderly) to select other kinds – these kiosks were popular because they stocked more esoteric brands than other retail outlets.
I vaguely remember you had to know which brands needed re-ordering and from what distributors. I was 16/17 then – it is probably illegal now for a youth of that age to sell tobacco products (and most of those brands are now banned under EU law for their high tar/nicotine content). I must have helped finish off more folk than your average heroin dealer (and although my parents disapproved of me smoking and my mum had stopped when she was pregnant with my sister in 1980, they thought it was a perfectly respectable job).
I was surprised at how long some of the regular customers actually lasted, even though a great number of them looked like they had indeed fought and died in three world wars, many were well into their 80s and beyond (some would repeatedly tell me their age and produce valid pension cards, bus passes and other such ID even though there was no requirement for an adult to do so unless they were making a large purchase and paying by cheque, and old folk usually always paid cash and bought the weeks supply at the weekend. Perhaps buying cigarettes and tobacco from an Oriental “person of colour” was still viewed as an exotic and rebellious act, amongst the older generation it was still seen as daring for women to smoke and older married men were usually discouraged from smoking pipes and cigars indoors…
