Pros
The staff were quite pleasant to work with.
Cons
The upper management/owners of the UK franchise are woefully under qualified and clueless. They have no conception of how to implement an effective or realistic business strategy. They make all sorts of grandiose and unrealistic promises, that are simply ridiculous to anyone with even the slightest amount of business sense. For example, their goal was to open 15 restaurants in the Cardiff region in the space of 1 year. This obviously did not work out. They ended up only opening 3 restaurants. One of those restaurants shut down in less than 6 months. Furthermore, for some unfathomable reason, they saw it fit to hire over 120 staff members before the first restaurant in Cardiff was even set up (the majority of these staff members were on 35hr contracts). Of course, this brilliant idea backfired tremendously and they wound up spending a ridiculous amount of money on labour. To cut back on expenses the upper management implemented mass lay offs that were completely uncoordinated and conducted at random. Our numbers dwindled from 120 to about 20 staff members in the space of 6 months. This massive reduction in staffing numbers negatively impacted the speed and quality of service. Crew morale was abysmal and customer satisfaction tanked. This consequently had a considerable negative impact on sales. The upper management team basically swept these problems under the rug and only ended reacting to these issues when their restaurants barely had enough staff left to function, as everyone had either been sacked or quit. Instead of taking accountability for their mistakes, the owners scapegoated restaurant managers and team members alike, firing even more employees. Consequently, they had to transfer staff from other regions in the UK in order to cope with the lack of employees in the Cardiff stores. I could give countless examples about the incompetence i've encountered whilst working for this organisation. Unfortunately there aren't enough hours in the day.
