© Evan Woods 2024-2026
The following was drawn from informal conversations with gamblers and those involved with several gambling companies. It’s observable and experiential fact with a splattering of reasonable speculation, all of it reflecting varying levels of frustration from both shop staff and customers.
The latest tax rules (from 20% to 41%, all sports except horse racing from 0% to 25%) have had a massive effect on all gambling companies prompting internal restructuring and a rash of shop closures. But for those shops still open, there’s no change at the front line.
Betting shops. A place to mingle with like-minded people on the same level whatever their stations in real life. I say real life because inside a betting shop everything is a dream – punters dream of that big win, game players dream of emptying the machines and the shop staff dream of being anywhere else at all, wondering what horrendous thing they did in a previous life to deserve the torture of spending this one in a betting shop from early morning to late night.
Betting shops attract punters from all walks of life; the rich and the poor, the brightest of brain and the lowest of brow, the cleanest and the filthiest (often the filthiest), but whatever their background an awful lot of them – though certainly not all – have one thing in common: a complete lack of respect for the shop, its contents, the other customers and of course the staff. They throw tickets and other rubbish they’ve brought in with them anywhere except into a bin even when they’re right next to one. Staff have shop pens thrown at them and are occasionally threatened with violence. It’s entirely possible that with fewer shops open the chances of attempted robbery in the remaining ones increase.
There are no ‘strangers-are-friends-you-haven’t-met-yet’, only strangers who might try to stab your eyes out with that little pen when their bet on a horse, dog or fruit machine eats their money. When that does happen, do the companies do anything about it? Only if the staff press the panic button; the voice of a security person comes through the speakers asking if the staff member is okay, which is pretty much all the staff are likely to get from an allegedly uncaring, detached management. And if a hooligan customer makes the mistake of picking on an employee capable of self defence, one wonders which combatant would face legal action. There is no desire on the gambling companies’ part to prosecute unless the circumstances absolutely force them to, it’s too much trouble.
The general public’s perception of betting shops as holes is close to the truth. The atmosphere hints at depression, most of it behind the counter. Don’t let the smile fool you, it’s only there because it has to be. The gaming industry’s version of care in the workplace is regarded by employees as a purely mechanical response to minimum legal necessity.
A fair amount of that despair stems from the trading hours set over the years through battles with the competition. The early and late shifts are often irregular, which can cause both psychological and physical problems. There is very little double-manning and it has been observed that many of the shops are miserable and empty with no reason to be open much beyond office hours. Shops open fifteen hours a day, seven days a week which seems pointless to those working in them. Why, unless they are occupied by customers every day from open to close? And for the ones that are occupied late at night, it’s a fair bet some of those customers are society’s otherwise unwanted, blindly pressing buttons on the fruit machines, again causing problems and misery for the often single staff member on duty.
Then there are equipment failures that interrupt trading and cause bad feeling with customers; off-the-shelf software seemingly patched to just about do the job; the frustration of faults in counter tills; grumpy fruit machines and betting terminals that’ve got it in for staff and customers alike. And the noise, even customers complain about the game machines with the constantly repeating tones, the commentary on the virtual races that never changes, the general grinding electromechanical buzz of machinery. Short of leaving the premises there is no way of shutting any of it out.
It has been noted that if a fruit machine breaks down the repair crew will be there within hours because it affects trading. If the air-conditioning breaks down in summer heat repairs might not take place for weeks, leaving everyone sweating in a filthy atmosphere where staff and customers alike believe that their health and morale is unimportant to the companies until it’s pointed out that the broken air-con is sending customers to a competitor.
There is a lot of promotional material. Unless a shop has digital window displays, the posters in the windows are required to be changed every couple of days and sometimes every day. They quickly become ripped and tatty in the front windows. But the worst of it is that hardly anyone looks at them; the customers know it’s a betting shop and anyone who doesn’t know what it is isn’t interested or cares. There are good reasons to revert to the old days of blackout. Nowadays children see the pictures on the window posters and want to enter shops thinking they can meet the animals. Get them while they’re young? Inside the shops there’s a mass of visual clutter which as a whole is meaningless, very few customers actually see it – there’s too much and it rarely registers apart from giving the impression of a multi-coloured background.
Staff and customers alike believe that the marketing wizards lurking in head office really do live on another planet. Contrary to reports from corporate levels the customers are rarely interested in promotions and wish only for the staff to provide the expected service. There’s far too much runaround with special offers, game machine tournaments and targets. Setting weekly targets for signing customers up for X amount of membership cards and the bewildering inundation of over-complicated offers is pressurising enough in a busy city shop with multiple staff, but in other areas saturation is reached very quickly when all the local residents have finally been convinced to take part in what they regard as snake-oil sideshows. Customers go in to place bets or use the machines, not to be bullied in a sales environment.
Add to that the problems of single-manning behind the counter and it just isn’t practical, a fact that clearly escapes those in the marketing departments who go at their labours with gusto but clearly no experience of the effects. Reportedly, this lack of awareness annoys and confuses staff with the amount of offers, especially those that ‘must meet the targets’ and are all completely different in how they have to be processed – and the details necessary to carry out the processing is frequently slapdash, hardly ever imparted to the staff in any consistent or sensible way. “Here are wonderful offers for your customers” which indicates front-line disconnection and “wonderful” is not how the customers see it. Most sports-betting customers are not interested in the games machines, so why bully shop staff into pressing them into a tenners’ worth of free machine credit? They look at the ticket in disgust and hand it back.
Target-driven game machine tournaments are another bugbear. Get twenty customers to enter every day or else! So the record will eventually indicate that twenty customers entered, or more likely five trusted customers and the rest are often the same trusted customers under different names talked into playing because hardly any other punters want to take part, reasons given being that the games are rubbish or the prize is rubbish. And if a shop has very few game machine customers that day, it’s impossible. Staff realise that if an idea doesn’t work it should be dropped, however they believe that particular logic doesn’t register further up the ladder. Speaking to customers, they realise what’s going on and many will help out but it’s still demoralising for the shops.
Betting shop workers in general are not experienced used car sales people (if they were they’d be making a decent income selling cars), but mostly just ordinary people with a lack of other employment choices. The constant target-badgering from a disrespected, splintered and largely unknown upper hierarchy causes a great deal of angst, bad attitudes and in some, mental anguish. The answer to anyone brave enough to complain is frequently “if you don’t like it, you can leave” which seems to be the prevalent solution to pretty much any problem surfacing from the shop floor. There are many staff problems, many resignations and straight up walkouts testifying to that solution. Any staffer who can find employment elsewhere will do just that which is no surprise when they work antisocial hours and are paid less money than other sectors go on strike about.
On that note there were rumblings of a strike in the 2010s which came to nothing in the face of corporate indifference, the attitude being that shop staff are expendable. Feel free to resign if you are unhappy.
Hypocrisy, paranoia and contradictions run like veins of bad ore through crumbling rock giving both gaming company staff and customers nightmares. The essence of the business is to encourage people to gamble, while simultaneously chasing them away with invasive questioning about how they earn their money or general affordability. Regulations centred around preventing money-laundering or gambling harm are strict and the bar is getting lower. Should they wish to continue, customers are forced to provide personal details including bank statements or refused service with the likelihood of being refused regardless of supplying proofs. Take care of the customer but encourage their business / refuse their business / demonstrate compliance to Gambling Commission regulations then allow them to gamble, or maybe not. It’s confusing and breeds suspicions that the long-term goal in going along with regulations is to chase customers away, giving the companies a good excuse to cut even more of the expense of the high street battleground in favour of the constantly growing online frontier where controls can be enforced with the ease of flicking a virtual switch. Faceless companies can ignore customer complaints.
The way the companies deal with fraudsters is regarded by the shop workers as a special torment. Against the threat of disciplinary action it’s once again on the staff’s heads to recognise and refuse service to known fraudsters, some of whom have a history of violence. Laying the blame with the staff, many of whom are constantly new to the job due to staff turnaround is morally and ethically wrong. The companies know who the fraudsters are but they rarely claim responsibility and prosecute, they think it isn’t worth the trouble. However they are very quick to take action against and/or dismiss their own shop staff when mistakes happen or someone has the misfortune to fall foul of financial desperation.
The job of counter staff in any gambling chain is not a happy one and very stressed a lot of the time. However having said that, talking to young and thirty-ish employees across all brands has revealed a small percentage who think the job is easy, it suits them and they can suspend their distaste. But a longer chat with them brings out why – it’s their lack of ambition for themselves, they don’t care and that’s what makes it easy. Older people will take the job only because if they need to supplement their pensions, there is no other choice. Either that or working in that type of retail environment is pretty much the only non-ageist occupation there is. Anyone refused employment by a supermarket is likely to find a warm welcome in a betting shop given the constant lack of staff.
Some companies have joined the politically correct movement and taken to referring to shop staff as ‘colleagues’. Genuinely feeling like a colleague and working as one is often the case in other walks of life but in betting shops staff regard themselves as employees. Calling them colleagues gives the impression the company is attempting to minimise the negative impact of the bad wage and bad job, attempting to inspire loyalty by duping the staff into the delusion of having some decision-making power within the company. According to chit-chat very few believe that. The companies do run online ‘suggestion boxes’ but the staff presume them to be nothing more than empty platforms created to cover for the pretence that their opinion matters.
Out of the handful of high street gambling businesses one or two appear better to work for, less restrictive with a different ethos. But employees of all suffer similar low wages and stress, often associated with the possible dangers. I haven’t seen any evidence but apparently one high street gambling company requires new staff to sign death waivers so that if they are killed on duty the company is liable only to pay one years’ wages to the family. A websearch turns up reports of companies paying substantially more than that; did the families of the deceased threaten to talk to the press or take some form of legal action? Gambling harm takes many forms and shop staff are harmed through unhealthy work practices, contradictory moralism and the minimum wage. What price the facade?
For all these assaults on minds, senses and bodies and the sometimes dangerous late nights the staff are expected to take full responsibility for absolutely everything, right or wrong, including dealing with loopy customers, some with violence in their hearts. It does have the undertone of a degenerate business.
Switching to playing Devil’s Advocate on behalf of the bookies for a moment, the Gambling Commission’s regulations place a lot of pressure on the companies, their front-line shops and on-line departments, but to no real effect where gambling addicts are concerned as they will always find a way. The general feeling is that the Commission’s only business is to pressure companies with sanctions and place massive fines on them. Its corporate structure means that its staff is usually part-time, made up of people simultaneously employed in unrelated professions without the advantage of genuine gambling business experience. For the general public, it seems to exist for no other reason than to present the idea that the government is concerned about gambling-related harm and therefore so are the gambling companies.
If that is the case then why is television full of gambling adverts and why are free offers allowed in the press? Colourful ads produced by all the big companies are aired more frequently when children are obviously likely to be watching TV. Yes again, get ‘em while they’re young. And if the adults can’t control themselves, are self-excluded or banned but get served anyway, the only fault on the staff side is trusting the customer, especially with new employees. More experienced staff may have a sense of who’s entered the premises and act accordingly, jumping on the customer before they can place a bet or play a machine, but in reality that’s often difficult due to shop layout or amount of customers. Then they have to fill in the required form which could lead to disciplinary action. On that note, received chatter is that some forms have the feeling of being skewed towards corporate innocence, giving staff the idea they are incriminating themselves.
One of the Gambling Commission’s strategic objectives is “Protecting children and vulnerable people from being harmed by gambling” which seems pretty meaningless when reduced to asking the simple questions such as why are gambling advertisements allowed on television? Why are free bet vouchers allowed to be printed in readily available newspapers? Why the long opening hours designed to encourage gambling?
The Commission released a revised set of rules and regulations in 2024. Do they address any real problems or are once again watered down under pressure from the gambling companies? It could result in closing betting shops completely to end high street gambling, but should we be more concerned with reforming the reformists, regulatory bodies with little or no personal knowledge of the gambling business? Front-line staff have no direct communication or consultation with the Gambling Commission regarding regulations, only the top corporate decision makers get to parley.
TV ads and gambling programmes shown late at night are within the scope of adults who can supposedly make their own decisions, good or bad. Words like ‘deposit’ are used to give an impression of surety, instead of stating outright that this is gambling. Any small print at the bottom of the screen is irrelevant to viewers. Calling a gambling game lotto or bingo is misleading, the TV ads which are prevalent in the mornings and afternoons when youngsters will be watching are colourful and playful, clearly and deliberately aimed at children. So what is the Gambling Commission’s stand on this? Their website neatly circumvents the question by not having any such topics, restricting itself to licensing, rules and pointing to external tools. To an outsider it seems strange that the Commission has no desire (or no power?) to concern itself with the subject. One wonders who’s pulling the strings.
The Advertising Standards Authority doesn’t skip the subject at all, in fact it has rules, none of which appear to be followed:
16 Gambling – Principle. The rules in this section are designed to ensure that marketing communications for gambling are socially responsible, with particular regard to the need to protect children, young persons and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited.
17 Gambling – Principle. The rules in this section are designed to ensure that gambling advertisements are socially responsible, with particular regard to the need to protect children, young persons and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited.
The view from the sofa is very different, to parents and guardians it looks like a blind eye is being turned to the gambling companies inundating television with ads produced for the sole purpose of hooking schoolchildren into a lifetime of gambling. How is that allowed under either organisation’s regulations – or lack thereof?
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