Xtra-vision closed its 80 stores across Ireland four years ago
Via Reddit Ireland.
Xtra, Xtra!
Read all about it.
Ex-Xtra-vision staff recall popcorn snaffling, Golden Movie Ticket Pass madness and other oddities of working in the video rental behemoth.
Momalloyd writes:
‘Bringing home left over popcorn every night was a perk, until the audit department found out and lost their shit over it.
One of the stores I did cover shifts in had nearly everyone let go over that, even the manager. One guy was fired because there was security footage of him eating a single piece of popcorn as he was emptying the machine into a bin.
In the end the utterly useless union had to get involved to stop the madness, before it spread to other stores. Most people were offered their jobs back, but few took it.
Funny thing is, it was my store that was due to be audited that day, and for some reason they went to a different store first. So when they did get to our store and asked about the popcorn, we knew to shut our mouths.’
MorroCleawater writes:
‘it seemed every store had a different level of seriousness when it came to popcorn. I used to have a small box in the back for snacking away on throughout the day. We ran a quiet store though, although I expect every store was crazy quiet in those last few years.
The most fucked up shit my store had was when the company put quotas on pre-orders where every staff member needed to get 5 a day on the newest [insert generic AAA title here]. We only got about 10-15 customers in the store each day, and some staff only had 2-4 hour shifts.
If we didn’t make it “we’d be fired”. I obviously didn’t expect we would, but the stand-in manager at the time forced us all to fake pre-orders. He got in a lot of trouble for it iirc, but it didn’t matter when the whole company closed down like 3 months after.’
Richie131 writes:
‘I was let go for eating Xtravision popcorn! So were two other lads working in the same shop. I ended up taking them to the Labour Relations Commission on grounds of unfair dismissal, and I won. I always joke that I kicked em while they were down, they were already in receivership at the time.
Got a few grand out of them but I would’ve preferred to have my job back for the summer to be honest.. ‘
Momalloyd adds:
‘The whole concept of having to up sell confectionery with every sale was a totally unheard of. You would have up to six people working on a shift for absolutely no reason. You could just go into the music vault and pick out a CD to listen to. What a magical time.
That all came to an end when our DM found the stack of 100 loose CD’s in a pile by the sound system all scratched to shit.
Other dark times were when we were told we weren’t allowed tell a customer that a movie was bad. It was around the time they brought in the first Golden Movie Ticket Pass, the paper one. It was a disaster. They tried to force us to up sell them with no training. On top of that a local kid nicked a box of them from our store, and sold them outside.’
Meanwhile…
Balfe writes:
‘I once got into shit from the district manager after they reviewed security footage to discover me standing outside of the counter and watching practically an entire movie. Gotta admit, it was quite funny watching that footage in fast forward.’
Ah here
