Pros
- Other employees are friendly and fun, and I often enjoyed my shifts just because I got to hang out with them. - Running and resetting the actual rooms (basically the bulk of the job) is easy so you never feel too exhausted. - Good outlet for creative people, neurodivergent people, people with ADHD, etc. - Management are barely ever in the building (probably bad from a business perspective, but nice for the employees) - Can be good supplemental income if you're a student or not looking for anything too regular. - Relatively easy to find cover and swap shifts with other employees if needed.
Cons
Unhygienic and unwelcoming physical environment: - No natural light. - The disused tube station aesthetic seems "immersive" to customers, but this is just because nothing is ever cleaned. - Unsafe environment for employees with respiratory issues: everything is covered in layers of dust, and mould and damp cake the walls in the employee offices. - A group of employees once had to spend a morning scrubbing the main office in masks after discovering extensive black mould behind a cardboard box. - Everything is always broken because the owners are cheap. Dreadful scheduling and complete lack of stability: - It is impossible to rely on this job for any form of income or stability due to the low pay (below London living wage) and inconsistent hours. - Despite being expected to send a month's worth of availability in advance, employees do not receive their daily schedules until the evening before, sometimes as late as 10pm. - Employees don’t know how long their shifts will be until this schedule is received, often finding out that they are not called in at all. - Management are hypocritical - despite it being a zero hour contract, employees are threatened and chastised for not giving “enough” availability, even though management will never guarantee them any hours on the days they give. - One week I was called in for a total of four hours despite giving five full days of availability. - It is incredibly hard to make plans or maintain a social life due do their scheduling methods, and also very hard to take shifts at other jobs as you are still expected to be “on call” all day. - Last minute bookings can extend your shift exponentially and you have no option but to run them; what starts as a 2 hour shift can end up as a 10 hour shift. - Management seem unaware and unappreciative of how much loyalty employees actually have to have in order to put up with their ridiculous scheduling whims. Employees are mistreated and undervalued: - Employees have been injured by badly maintained props and rooms. - There is no HR, and no proper channels to report concerns to management. People who have tried to talk to them about concerns have promptly been fired. - The company breaks employment law by not giving employees a 20 min break whilst working shifts longer than 6 hours. They would claim that employees get 20 minutes between each game if they ‘stick to the timings’, but these breaks never actually happen as customers are often late, bad at the games, or something inevitably needs fixing. - Certain employees are given favourable treatment (such as being allowed to leave for months at a time and then come back, or choose the exact times of day they’d like to be called in), where others are given zero leeway. - Many veteran employees were told they may not have a job to come back to in the new year if they took time off over Christmas to visit their families, despite giving consistent availability the rest of the year. - There is a revolving door of employees; management give them no incentive to stay, and they often lose their patience with the company within a few months. - My last couple of months became miserable as morale was incredibly low and everyone seemed as though they were desperate to leave.