Primark customers are “fat, pikeys” according to staff
By Paul Smith
There are over 500 groups on Facebook dedicated to mutterings about Primark, so you’ll forgive us if we don’t trawl through every single one of them. Not all the uber-chatter is courtesy of happy shoppers though, at least according to Brand Republic. Somewhere amongst those dozens of groups, the staff have waded in to give their customers a bit of verbal.
Despite being universally loved by the public for oodles of bargain prices, those wearing the Primark uniform aren’t feeling the love. One employee is quoted saying that “twat customers” leave folded clothes in a mess, and that she wanted to “dropkick them to the homeware department.”
Another from the women’s department moans about “hefty” shoppers who need to “lose some fucking weight”, while a third employee eloquently sums up the Primark experience by stating “the money is shit and the place is a market for pikeys.”
Many of us have similar thoughts in our day-to-day work, but we keep them in our heads rather than publish them in public, which is why social media is proving stressful for plenty of well known brands. Twitter allows companies to at least control their brand name and channel of information, but Facebook allows any Tom, Dick or Harry to create a group under the auspices of the business, whatever their personal agenda. Primark are hardly the first to find themselves firefighting after staff got all potty-mouthed online – Tesco, Waitrose and Virgin Atlantic have seen their employees vent their spleen on Facebook too.
Unsurprisingly, Primark has stated it has launched an investigation. Black bin liners and P45s will no doubt follow shortly afterwards.
feral trolley of the week
Surprised they even feel the need to say it out loud. It’s bloomin obvious. Spend 2 minutes in the store and you’ll lose track of chavs while you’re distracted by people messing up the display stacks.
Seems a bit unfair to punish employees for describing what they see.
Mike is right, my wife loves Primark but I hate going there because of the shit people a.k.a chavs that do such a mess.
If staff are so unhappy they need to express themselves in such a away then the company should look to what it’s doing wrong. If staff feel they are not getting support to do their jobs properly this is what happens.
maybe a security guard would deter the chavs
They should probably get a decent job then they wouldn’t be so stressed out with the thousands of people and hundred long queues, I think if I worked there I’d slag every single customer off once it starts to get busy!
Can’t say I’ve seen many chavs in Primark! Maybe the odd one but I guess that depends on where you live, I have to admit, being a guy I have no idea how to fold up clothes so I usually just dump them back down, but thats what the staff get paid for! So why are they moaning? Do they want to get paid for doing nothing?
I love the place for some items, socks and so on though the quality of the clothes isn’t excellent you can still grab a bargain!
Primark is pretty much the same as everywhere else, but 10x busier.
Staff are bound to get fed up with the customers, anyone who works with the public get grief from rude pikeys.
If the shop is 10xbusier they will get 10x rude pikeys! Makes perfect sense to me
Sounds about right for retail.
@Elsie,
My local branch has a security gaurd and all i have seen him do “once” is tell a lad to leave who had his shirt off. The lad said he wanted to buy a t-shirt, so he got fast tracked to the front of the 8 mile long queue to get his t-shirt to get out.
Lesson learnt, pick up what you want, show some skin, dont queue and then you’re out of there. How easy is that?!?!
@Ryan
Think about it Ryan, if you are applying for a job in Primark, your qualifications are not going to be amamzing, thus you can’t really apply for jobs elsewhere. Plus given it’s “credit crunch” and the UK economy is at it’s worst since blah blah blah, it’s not exactly easy to get a job now.
So why jack in a job that pays (primark) for a fancier job that pays (non available)
problem is all the little tramps who cant be bothered to put clothes back on the hangers if they dont want them and just chuck them on the floor.
Maybe if they didn’t stack all the clothes on top of each other, with the stupid sizes like XXL and XXS on the top and the ones everyone wants (S,M,L etc) at the bottom you wouldn’t need to destroy the whole pile to get to them!
@ Matt
I’m thinking XXL is probably quite popular…
I think I’d rather wear Tesco Cherokee than even set foot in Primark. Random stiches and stupid phrases that don’t mean anything adorned all over cheap wannabe fruit of the loom t-shirts. Na would rather wear Cherokee, than Primani.
primark customers who throw clothes on the floor ensure Primark has to hire uneducated, ungrateful wtetches, opps employees to pick them up. Its what keeps you all employed! Some would be glad for that so quitcher b***chin!
@ Tom… *LAUGHS*
@ RAY… I think that the problem with clothes ending up on the floor or untidy isn’t people not putting them back on hangers, but people not folding clothes back to put them on the pile, or getting stuff from the bottom of the pile and not being bothered to put it back.
But then, if you are going to run a shop where DIFFERENT items are in the same stack then of course the stack is going to become a mess…
Fat pikeys have to get their clothes somewhere, herds of naked fat pikeys is far worse a scenario imo.
HA HA HA. We all know it’s shite. So what if someone wrote it down!
It’s like a fu*%!n jumble sale in there.
Still Pikeys have to shop somewhere and it keeps em out the decent shops!
People chuck the clothes on the floor as they’re not worthy of a hanger.
Personally, would rather go butt naked than wear anything from the shithole know as Primark.
Rather concerned by the idea espoused by a few above that service workers should be grateful for their lives being made harder simply because it keeps them in a job.
Let the poor bastards blow off some steam. Unless they’re specifically slagging off named individuals, what they are doing is harmless and no worse than me going, in general “everyone in the world is a fat, ignorant cunt” (and to be fair, no less inaccurate.)
I work at Primark full-time (Mon-Fri), and yeah, trust me, I can certainly categorise the main groups of customers who shop there on a REGULAR basis (after working there for 14 months, trust me, even a blindman can spot this general group categorisation) into 5 headings:
1. Cheap-ass, nasty, ‘orrible, un-washed, smelly, uneducated, (long-term) unemployed, social-security, benefit-claiming, ill-mannered, council-estate, tatooed, ugly, yellow-teethed, malnutritioned CHAVS! (yes, you heard that right…. CHAVS!). The ones straight off the local council estate. That each have about 9 or 10 kids tagging along with them. One kid from this man, one kid from that man, one kid from the other man. (and then same again x3!), lol. All sitting on the soche. Great.
2. Illegal immigrants (in the case of MY particular store, this would overwhelmingly include Somalians or Middle-Easterners). My observational powers have estimated that about 85% – 90% of these peoples cannot speak, write or understand a single word of English, which is just SO annoying for us employess who have to try to understand their questions/requests on the shopfloor. It makes me angry quite often and puts me off working in such an environment. I can confidently say that most of these people DO smell quite bad, have horrnendous breath, and inadvertently spit on your face when speaking to you in some ‘orrible incomprehensible cunt-language.
3. Students
4. Old-age pensioners
5. Mentally-deficient people
6. ***Bonus category*** – young men fresh off the boat from South India. (usually post-graduate Engineering students from Mumbai/Bangalore or some place like that, lol). They think that shopping in Primark in London (ANY of the central or greater London stores, that is) is like having gone shopping in – what would seem to us lot – the Chanel Boutique in Paris, lool. They REALLY haven’t got a clue. Anything tha isn’t a disorderly outdoor flee market seems like heaven to these kind of people. Primark in the UK is VERY VERY high-end to these people.
And that’s basically yer lot.
i personaly think primark is a great place to shop so of us don’t have the money to spend on brands from M&S you can get the same type of stuff from primark at a cheaper price i think it’s a great place im gonna be honest half of the Uk’s population are fat face it it’s macdonalds fault for all that.
what have people got against chavs many are the way they are because their parents don’t give a damm about them and have been badly treated half their lives and just want to be recongnised if you don’t like it deal with it.
This is coming from the mouth of a 15 year old girl who’s been through it all think about what your saying folks
I’m sick to death of people looking down on people who shop at Primark.
It seems that if you shop there you are common, ill mannered, have about 4+ kids, are unemployed and overweight.
well, yes i am unemployed(at the moment), but I’m not a single parent. infact i don’t have kids at all.I’ll admit to being overweight, but i am not a chav. (I a 40 years old woman) Also i dress very nicely and I have begin brought up to be well mannered and polite.
So don’t judge everyone who shops at primark the same . Also went I shop there I always put the clothes back where I found them.
I’d rather be someone like myself, who shops at primark, than be a narrow-minded snob.
[...] Airways, Primark and other high-profile companies have all been caught out by staff posting comments on Facebook [...]
“Think about it Ryan, if you are applying for a job in Primark, your qualifications are not going to be amamzing, thus you can’t really apply for jobs elsewhere. ”
A friend of mine worked in Primark for a while. She has an MA. The staff she worked with, many from overseas who had started there to get them started over here, seemed lovely people.
Incidentally, how do you know whether someone’s an illegal immigrant? Do they wear special T-shirts or, let me guess, you’re just a presumptious ignorant classist and racist dick? Who clearly has no idea what India is like either. They have planes there these days, not boats.
This is really a good post so that even though I do not post on blogs, I have to post this time.