Two weeks notice

One of the busiest periods in retail is Christmas, and so The Company, in trying to keep things under control, has a strict policy of no leave for store staff in December: for casuals or managers. Thus, anyone who plans on going on holidays must either take their time off earlier or later, and make sure they have their leave approved well in advance. Others just quit. With such a hardline policy against allowing leave over the holiday period, most staff will choose their holiday over working long, late hours and serving stressed, cranky customers.

The Company policy doesn’t allow staff to come back once you quit over the holidays - if they did, it’d just be like approving leave for the holidays. I think it’s more out of spite than anything else. Though I think they might reconsider if the staff member had been ‘valuable’ and highly skilled and long-serving and they were desperately short-staffed. However, if you quit at any other time of the year for whatever reason, you may be welcome back. There are now several staff who have quit, gained other employment in retail, only to have come crawling back.

I was considering going on a brief 5 week holiday from the end of November til early January, and was faced with the dilemma (ooo, tough one!) of the (im)possibility of being granted leave, or whether I’d have a job when I came back. Quitting for me was not an issue, as I’m sure I’d be able to find similar/better employment somewhere else relatively quickly, but I felt bad that I’d just started training at HO with the intention of covering for Helena when she went on holidays over January.

I felt obligated to Gemma, who had shown faith in me for suggesting me for the position, and also to Helena and other HO staff, for putting in the effort to train me. I know it’s not easy training new staff, and there is considerable inconvenience to many staff not directly involved in my training. Sharing an office with Grant, National Sales Manager or something like that, I was privy to a few phone conversations which I probably should’ve tried harder to ignore. He was going off to Gemma about one of her staff that wanted leave over Christmas- basically, to quit and come back, as she had been working in the warehouse for several years before now working in stores. The gist of it was, there was no chance in hell that she was going to be approved leave. Which left me more than a little apprehensive. I wanted to be sure I gave the appropriate length of notice so that they could possibly allow me to go on holidays and return to my position in stores and in HO over January. If not, I would also want to give them a reasonable amount of notice to find someone else to train in HO and I could finish my shifts with 2 weeks notice. I am loyal, to some extent, to The Company, but I also understand that this is the fickle world of retail, and that we are all basically expendable. Having worked there for so long and being given such responsibility, I am also (I like to think) highly employable.

Well, after all that, the holiday plans fell through, and I won’t be going away probably until I graduate... So I’ll be able to put in the hard yards over Christmas and really suck up to and impress The Company. I really was looking forward to another Christmas and post-Christmas sales period at The Company. Can’t wait. I was looking forward to seeing how far I could push my luck and whether or not I would be granted leave!