Pros
HMV to myself and to many is a dream job. It seems absolutely perfect if like myself you're a huge nerd and love film, tv, anime technology and the likes right? While partly true be warned. HMV has it's ups and downs. First the ups. + Amazing staff / fellow colleagues, you'll get along well easily if you're chill with all staff they're great and very helpful people. +Staff discount on most HMV products, always nice to have if you like myself like what HMV has to sell + Store opening hours are comfortable with most closing at 17:30 + Relatively simple job most of the time just waiting on til and selling stuff
Cons
Now the downs, depending on your view these may not be a big deal to you but they certainty were to me. - Horrific constant tracking / observation of your "stats", your store / manager will track every move. HMV has an awful policy of setting completely stupid goals for its staff such as collecting customer emails for recipts, selling tote bags and other rubbish as well as subscriptions to the news letter. And if you don't meet their pointless goals you're in for a treat even if you constantly try (which most of the time is awkward, time consuming and annoying for yourself and customers) you'll unlikely be able to meet these targets as most people obviously don't want to give their email out which in return will end up with you getting moaned at by your manager constantly. Which despite you selling thousands sometimes worth of stock your lack of emails seems to be the deal breaker. That to me was a huge downside and I find their constant obsession with collection emails and hitting pointless goals incredibly frustrating. This is also something they do NOT tell you in the interview, honestly if I knew this I probably would of not taken the job. - Lack of reward / unsatisfying work. You're probably gonna spend most of the time selling rubbish to people or just standing around, and dealing with annoying rude customers. And when you do good you're probably not gonna get much reward or recognition for it. Maybe a small congrats at most. - Minimum wage pay. Yeh pretty standard now, you earn the store absolutely hundreds (sometimes thousands) per shift while you'll be lucky to earn £60+ / shift dependent on your age and length of shift - Lazy / unhelpful manger. Spends most of the time upstairs doing stock whatever, probably taking much longer than they need or distracting staff. (Usually the female ones of course) - Will not respect your availability. Was VERY clear about my availability for it to be broken numerous times and voiced my complaint and while this was addressed it was clear the manager was not happy about it despite my clear statement in interviewing. - Lack of training. Personally I had only maybe 1 or 2 days of minimal training, while I did not really need or want much more as I caught on quick it was interesting to find that once I joined I was basically forgotten about being new