I ' m working as a Christmas temp at a retailer in the Bullring in Brum , as the start date of my grad job in Leeds was January and I couldn ' t afford to travel the world to find myself in the interim . Anyway , whilst October was quite busy , I presume because of weather , this month has been eerily quiet . I like to read the reports that our managers get when they leave them out and while sales have definitely gone up in the run up to Christmas , in our store they are nowhere near expectations or equivalent figures last year . I ask my manager and he puts it down to loss leading pricing by major supermarket ' s selling equivalent stock and online retailers . They have had to lower hours , and not hire temps who they were going to hire . They have also reduced one of the supervisor roles . In my honest opinion a lot of their business practice is backwards and inefficient in the extreme . They sticker almost every product and they calculated , with man hours , it was costing 3 p a sticker . The warehouse system is archaic . And the only advantage I can think of when going to a store , being able to ask staff how the products work specifically , is mitigated by the lack of training the Christmas temps receive on product knowledge .