Gap Employee Reviews about "long hours"

Pros

It’s a good work environment, in the sense that you do get an hour beak for an 8h shift or 1/2h for 6h and the people you work with are generally nice. Staff discount is 50% off full price items and 10% off sale items (only in-store discount). It’s an easy job, you just give good customer service to the customers.

Cons

The long hours especially around the holiday period. It can be very hectic and messy and mentally draining. During the holiday period, i.e from Black Friday till after the new year, so end of November till end of January you cannot take off any holidays. Most people tend to leave since their holiday is usually to be with their family for Christmas/new year. The staff discount has strict rules, as you can’t let your friends use your staff discount as you have to pay for all the items yourself, they make you sign and print your name along with the store code. However we do get friends and family discount during a week 2 weeks before Black Friday, but I just think this is just to make people think they are getting good deal with 50% off with the friends and family discount, but Black Friday normally has better discount for selected items. When working at gap let’s say you are on a 12h contract, apparently they have a policy that you have to be flexible up to 16h and that you must give a 3 day availability. Most people can’t do this as they are full time university students and have every day full. And a shift time can be from open, 07:00am till close 23:00. And when they ask you to be flexible for another 4h, I feel like they take advantage of this as they will always give you 16h even if your contracted for 12h, and this is not what was agreed on when you first start. This is actually unfair. If you want a job full time/apply for a job full time I.e 24h etc. You should know that you won’t be getting your hours you are contracted for, for the first few months you will probably be working 12h/16h per week as you are still new and they won’t give you your full contracted hours. Additionally, when the shifts come out it’s usually very very late. Recently, (nov 2019) our new rota had just come out 2 DAYS before they was asked to work. So the rota came out on Friday and workers on Sunday told they was working on the Friday. This is too short notice if you ask me. They are usually late on doing the rota by about a week, but 2 days before you are scheduled to work is unacceptable. The managers need to know that we have lives outside of work, we understand you have to be flexible etc, but we was told that rota would be 2 weeks in advance. They keep making promises they can’t keep. Yes they can argue that if your normally scheduled in for a Sunday shift, you know you are working on a Sunday so you should be expecting to work a shift on a Sunday, but shift times can vary, and usually it is not always consistent. Sometime rota delays can cause us stress as we have other people to answer to other than at work. Additionally, the pay. Working in London, in the west end which is usually the busiest place as we have the flagship store there, we don’t even get the minimum London living wage. This is 2019, they London living wage is £10.75 per hour, sales associate gets paid if you work in the west end £8.63 per hour and pay varies in different parts of London, the more you go a way from central London, the less you get paid per hour.