Wellworths Blog

20^th October 1990, my first day with Woolworths! As a 15 year old it was my first Saturday job and I loved it. From the start, I found the interaction with people and the fact every day brought something new was fascinating. In August of 1994 I was asked by my Manager at the time Paul Eales if I would like to go to an assessment centre to become a trainee Assistant Manager. I passed and that was the first role that took me to Dorchester. Over the next 14 years I had many roles and went to a number of different stores, 1109 Chard, 0089 Poole and 1106 New Milton to name a few, going back to Dorchester on a few occasions, but finally coming back in the February of 2004 to become the Store Manager. During this time I had my son Daniel and in 2006 I had my daughter Alice.

That’s a very very brief overview of my Woolworths days, but I’m sure I will write about that in more detail another day. What I can say is that the company went through a lot of changes in that time, the demerger from Kingfisher in 2001 and although I can definitely say that I never imagined that Woolworths would one day not be on the High Street, I could see things were not going well. As managers we felt we had lost all control of our stores and were just managing check lists! Directed to do all task’s from Head office. It was hugely frustrating. As it got close to 26^th November 2008 when the shares were suspended, at store level we didn’t really have a clue what was going on. We were having daily conference calls to try and stop our concerns, but we all knew something wasn’t right. Even when we got to the 26^th, we were very much kept in the dark. I remember having to Google Woolworths and getting more news from various sources on the internet than from internal sources.

 Tommorow - “The hardest Days…”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.