Pros
The pay, if you work there long enough, can be decent and there are lots of opportunities for extra hours. The work colleagues on the shop floor are usually lovely and helpful, you get to give sweets out and make customers smile and the job is an interesting one with visual merchandising opportunities. There are cute products, and the 40% discount is really good
Cons
The culture on the area management level can be extremely harsh and target-obsessed at the expense of everyone's wellbeing. There's a high staff turnover (as the job is hard - you're running around shifting very heavy boxes and hopping on tills and working at a very fast pace, for 8.5-9 hours excluding the break) and the expectations are still sky-high. The Easter half term week had us lose 1/3 of our staff approximately, including our manager, but our targets were still doubled when we had so few staff. You will often be short-staffed and still expected to be very efficient and get everything done, with the risk of staying behind v late at night if you don't (especially if you're a manager or supervisor, in which case you often won't get paid for that overtime either). If you're on tills and you're short-staffed, you need eyes in the back of your head to manage the tills, restock and replenish the food and campaign sections, ring the bell for colleagues (who have an annoying habit of skiving in the office and not responding), clean up breakages and spillages near you, dodge customers in the very narrow shop corridors and all the while deal with often horrible customers in endless queues because you're too short-staffed to have enough people to help you. On my last shift there I did all this alone while training and helping a flustered girl on her first shift who had been very badly trained by another member of staff. There was only one other person to assist me who was also charged with getting one half of the shop tidied and so wasn't on the shop floor much, and this was on a busy Satuday. The only thing that the managers noted down was that we were ~£150 below target that day. But you'd better not get tired from this, or shifting all the boxes around the shop, because that impacts your "PACE" (one of the company values) and lowers your efficiency, and looks worse on your probation and when the area manager comes to visit and starts inspecting everyone. Also, often the fact that you are a school student (even in exam season) will not prevent the company from wanting you to work quite a lot of extra hours. The enjoyment of your job greatly depends on how nice the managers and assistant managers are. Most were nice, but one person in particular was very hostile and difficult to approach. Another person was also hostile and extremely strict and was forbidden to come back to our store after several work colleagues made statements about his creepiness towards them.