He seems very abrupt in his manner and easy to see how he potentially has a bully boy style culture in his business.
I used to work for SD and can confirm that a lot of those higher up fit this description. They work their employees hard, with the salaried full-timers on a minimum of 10 hour days, 5 days a week. Often you'd be summoned, with less than a week's notice, to go and re-fit a new shop in another County so you'd have 12+ hour days there. Then there were stocktake weeks which were 70 hour weeks.
However, the pay was very good with all the performance bonuses linked to the share price. Bonuses of double people's annual salaries were paid numerous times and there was progression available for hard workers.
There were some perks too as I once went to St James's park and sat in the Directors' box with colleagues and MA's PA. She was very game and made sure we all got slaughtered on the free drinks during the game and afterwards.
The guy chairing this meeting is so annoying and corporate and tilting the shit out of Ashley!
One thing MA is not, is corporate! Everyone wore tracksuits to work all the way up the chain almost to the top. There were cowboys all the way to the top in this company. One of his right-hand women (Karen Byers) was as rough as cheese/hard as nails.
Hes made a living out of pushing the lines and rules
Indeed he has. A good example was that his stores rarely kept to the legal opening hours on Sundays in order to squeeze more sales in when customers got to the retail parks and the other stores were closed.
Think theres a serious problem of how people are being treated in the workplace and alot of places are pushing their luck on a wide range of issues.
Store managers would use the zero hours contract as a way to cherry-pick the best workers and elbow out the ones they didn't like by just constantly giving them low/no hours. The workers would get the hump and then leave, so they always had to be on their toes to keep working. I can see how (sadly) some of the unscrupulous managers could abuse their position of power.
I have no love for ashley or the way he does business, respect for what hes achieved, but I felt he dealt with the interview like a normal bloke and thought it was quite endearing.
He is a very good retail business man. Taking established/quality brand names that were struggling and buying them on the cheap then manufacturing everything much cheaper/slashing the RRPs was a master-stroke. But when they came in the store at 75% off from the outset, you
knew that they'd never been on sale at the original (often inflated/ripoff) prices! Ashley's mission was to cripple all the other sports retailers because of historic feuds and that was the main driving force behind his extreme work ethic.
Author