General Manager
All Star Lanes
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I’m Flora.
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I’m the GM at
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All Star Lanes in White City,
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London.
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All Star Lanes is a bowling alley in Westfield
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that offers cocktails, bowling
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and all sorts of entertainment.
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You learn to manage people, managing their time, managing expectations,
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because, you know, every single person wants a different thing.
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Making sure that we meet
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the customer’s expectations.
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The best things?
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You get to meet a world of people from different
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backgrounds, from different countries, different cultures.
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You get to teach people, which is very good.
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I think one of the things that we do is make sure that, you know,
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if anyone wants to progress, help them to, you know, go up the ladder.
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To be honest, there’s not that many bad things.
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I try to look at it in a positive way.
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But I would say the odd grumpy customer – that would be it.
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I would say that it’s very good to be resilient,
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patient.
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You need to be a people person.
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I loved school. Yes.
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History was one of my favourites.
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DT was one of my favourites,
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free drawing. I did uni in Portugal.
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I did fashion design. At that time
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Porto had a lot of industry in terms of textiles and things like that.
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My family had a textile factory as well. So,
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you know, everything worked towards that.
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One of my teachers said to me, you can’t do anything
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unless you learn English because whether you go to Milan
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or Paris or whatever it is, you need to learn English.
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So after I left university, I came to England
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to learn English.
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I went from working in a coffee shop where I was a server,
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to become a supervisor.
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Joined another company,
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stayed there for about 4 or 5 years.
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Westfield opened.
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So I was here the day that Westfield opened.
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I worked for a company called 1910.
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So they sold it to Tortilla,
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and I joined All Star Lanes about two and a half years ago.
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People often think that, you know, it’s customer service.
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It can be your 20 hours a week work
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where you earn some money to help towards something else.
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Or it can be, you know, actually, you can very well make a good living of that.
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You can make your career of that.
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I would say that, yes I didn’t do
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fashion design because, you know, life happened.
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I’m not unhappy at all.
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I’m actually very happy.
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So that’s not – I don’t look at it as losing out on something.
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I look at it as making a different choice.
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Having kids makes things harder,
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but I look at it this way.
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With the sort of business that I’m in, I can adjust the hours,
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and that’s something that I take into consideration
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for the mothers that work with us.
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I think,
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accept that it’s not going to be easy,
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but there is a reward at the end of the tunnel,
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let’s say. So you will learn as you go.
“I don’t look at it as losing out on something. I look at it as making a different choice.” After a textiles degree, Flora came to the UK to learn English. She started working in a coffee shop and went on to a range of jobs in restaurants. She now works for the bowling alley and restaurant chain All Star Lanes.
More information about Managers and directors in retail and wholesale
The UK average salary is £29,813
There are 37.5 hours in the average working week
The UK workforce is 47% female and 53% male
Future employment
- Appoints staff, assigns tasks and monitors and reviews staff performance
- Liaises with other staff to provide information about merchandise, special promotions etc. to customers
- Ensures that adequate reserves of merchandise are held and that stock keeping is carried out efficiently
- Ensures customer complaints and queries regarding sales and service are appropriately handled
- Oversees the maintenance of financial and other records and controls security arrangements for the premises
- Authorises payment for supplies received and decides on vending price, discount rates and credit terms
- Examines quality of merchandise and ensures that effective use is made of advertising and display facilities
