‘I used to work at Primark – don’t go during this time of day’

Georgia Pontin is a former Primark employee who has been revealing some of the secrets of her stint working at the high-street store with her 91.5K TikTok followers. The lifestyle vlogger posts videos under the username @pontasaurus and has warned customers about the busiest time of day to visit a Primark store.

In an instalment of her video series “Primark secrets from someone who used to work there”, she said: “If you’re shopping at Primark don’t go during this time.”

Georgia went on: “Each store has a prime time which is their busiest hour so at the store I worked at our prime time was 2pm. During that time anyone who wasn’t on break or lunch had to be downstairs on the shop floor.

“Because it was so busy we had to go behind everyone and fold everything or put things back and make sure it was all neat, or at least we would try to. And often during that time that is when the queue is the longest.”

READ MORE: Primark ‘secrets’ staff use to make sure you don’t steal

Georgia’s video has amassed almost 6K “likes” at the time of writing, with viewers leaving their experiences in the comments section. Another former employee posting under the name Boydie, said: “I’ve worked at Primark and I can relate to everything on your videos.”

Another ex-worker said: “I was always mortified when I was given that stick.” Ashlea, who worked at Primark Manchester, said the prime time at her store was 3pm. “We used to call it rumble. 3pm rumble in Primark Manchester,” she said. “Everyone had to go to the shop floor and rumble (tidy and fold).”

In another recent video, Georgia explained how workers are trained to catch out potential thieves at the tills. She said: “If someone is buying a handbag or purse we had to check it. We had to open it up and physically check what’s inside because people think they can hide stuff in them.”

However, she was not allowed to be upfront with customers about whether they were really trying to steal or not. Georgia explained: “If we were on tills and found something in the bag when we were checking it we were not allowed to go ‘oh, are you stealing this?’

We had to say: ‘Do you want this too?’ And if they really want it they will say yeah, but if they’ve been caught most of the time they will act as though they didn’t know it was in there.”

She added: “Sometimes it’s a complete accident and people don’t actually know three is something in the bag but we do have to check in case someone is actually trying to steal something. But whenever I was on the tills and I had to ask someone that then I would think they were stealing but that was just me.”