Anyone in Australia will know the retailer that’s being referred to as “Hardly Normal”
As someone that used to work there, the business practices there have been bugging me for too long and I feel people should know the scummy things they do there.
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You are told, that if an item is listed as on sale but the customer is unaware. For example. The sale ticket hasn’t been put up yet, but it is on the website and scans at the sale price. You are to charge full price. If they say something about the price on the website, you’re to say “Oh really? Let me check” and then you give them the sale price.
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If the regular price drops, but the price sticker on the item has been missed, and there’s a sale on top of that. You’re told not to change the sticker, so people think they’re getting a bigger discount than they’re actually getting.
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If an item has an orange ‘best seller’ ticket on it, it’s actually not a best seller item. It’s there specifically to remind the sales staff that, that item has the most profit margin. And therefore commission out of all the items in that category.
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By law, full time staff in Australia get long service leave after 7-10 years (depending on state) employment with the same employer / business. But “Hardly Normal” found a loophole. Every 3 or so years, the franchisees swap stores. Instead of the business changing owners. They liquidate the business, so it no longer exists. And the new owner creates a new business with a new ABN at the same store and hires the staff at the store.
By doing this, not only can you never get long service leave due to not being employed by the same business for long enough, all the staff end up back on a 6 month probation period. So their employment could be terminated at any moment for any reason. -
They provide 0 defence leave for military reservists. Constantly denying them military service leave for BS reasons. When I was being called up to assist with the Australian bushfires in 2019 I was told
“No you can’t go, we have stocktake and that’s more important.”
When I was initially meant to be deployed due to covid, I was told “No, this covid thing is fantastic for business, business is booming, we’d be crazy to let you go away now.”
That was the last straw for me.
There’s more that they do that I highly disagree with and am disgusted by. But those are some of the biggest points I thought people should know about.