Share your experience with others
Let others know about your experience. It can be positive as well as negative.Latest activity
Send Senior Managers in to work as Junior Staff in the main airport and railway station WHSmiths for a couple of days. 8 months ago via web
Gatwick.
Heathrow
Liverpool Street.
Eurostar at King's Cross.
Just four WHSmiths in my recent experience, each sharing the following characteristics:
1) My time, somewhat valuable at the best of times in my no doubt inflated opinion, is suddenly urgently constrained by something I believe they call in the trade 'timetables'
2) Your stores seem to have a monopoly or near monopoly on provision of the goods I happen to want in these places - and seem to be making a pretty good profit on that situation I would guess, going by the prices you charge, say, for a cheap disposable biro.
3) Queues. Long, long, long queues. A complete lack of any seeming management of this problem (going by the eyeball rolling and despairing sighs of staff I've talked to about this). Often, in fact, while other staff are stacking or whatever.
8 months ago via web
WHSmith stores at tube and train stations create newspaper only queues and dispense with bar code scanning those newspapers so that you do not have to wait in long queues when all you want is a paper. 8 months ago via web
They do have 'honesty boxes' for papers in some airports, but it's irritating how in locations that they seem to have an armlock on, and where time is critical (I'm thinking specifically of Gatwick, Liverpool Street and Eurostar) they can't seem to get basic queue-management in order. I've even mentioned it to staff, leaving without getting what I want as seems usual, and they roll their eyes and just say 'management'. It seems incredibly inept. 8 months ago via web
