Pros
The people at Argos were friendly and welcoming, and there was genuinely a sense of being a team that pulled together to try and get through every crisis. Management on a store level always tried to help their employees and makes the best of a bad situation.
Cons
Argos is an exhausting, frustrating, dispiriting place to work. I (and most of my colleagues) were on contracts that meant we never knew how many hours a week we'd be working, or what those hours would be until the week before. You'd sometimes be facing three eight hour late shifts in a row, leaving you exhausted, or just a couple of three hour shifts in the middle of the day that were hardly worth coming in for. The store at which I worked was constantly chronically understaffed, which I understand is common. Getting holiday time was like getting blood out of a stone, and every sick day was treated as a betrayal. Breaks were limited to the legal minimum, usually fifteen minutes in a six hour shift. Argos cares about one thing and one thing only - money. Productivity was key; you had to sell as much as possible as quickly as possible. Very little training was given and those who DID manage to excel got no recognition or reward, only pushed to get even more next time. New procedures and policies were constantly introduced by senior management with no warning or oversight, leaving employees with vastly increased workloads, and I saw more than one colleague have to leave due to stress/nervous breakdown in a little over a year of working there. The company ticked all the official health and safety boxes but many unsafe practices were common, often leading to serious injury, as the emphasis was always on getting as much work done as quickly as possible. Every day was a new crisis. I'll say this for Argos - there was a real feeling of camaraderie, of pulling together against the odds. Unfortunately the odds we were against were set by the company itself. Any time I found myself talking about work to outsiders, they were constantly horrified. Argos is cheap because it pays it's staff next to nothing and treats them like dogs. That's all there is too it. Unfortunately many staff members were very young people often in their first real job, who didn't know that things could be any better. The final straw for me was when my immediate boss was essentially summarily fired for speaking out against new procedures and trying to stand up for his miserable and overworked staff - he was told he had an 'attitude problem' and demoted without warning. Then a new guy was brought in to fill his position who had never worked at Argos before...and I was told to train him. My own boss. I left shortly afterwards. Although I have had several demanding jobs in my life, I didn't truly know the meaning of hard work until I came to Argos, and I have never experienced or heard of a place that treats it's staff so appallingly. The longer you're there, the more it sucks you dry. To anyone thinking about working long -term at Argos, all I have to say is this: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.