In the summer holidays I worked at Sports Direct.

Sports Direct is a company that gets a very bad rap. Workers and commentators alike claim that Sports Direct is a stingy company, uninterested in the welfare of its workers and concerned only with the pursuit of pure, unadulterated profit.

Mike Ashley, the owner of Sports Direct, is a very clever businessman. This is something that I will not dispute; the man understands the limited lifetimes of individual brand names, and excels in turning those famished labels into something profitable, through the kind of capitalist wizardry that I cannot be bothered to explain here.

But here’s the thing; in my informed opinion as a former employee, I believe that it is my responsibility to explain to you that Sports Direct does not care one iota for the consumer. It is the concern of Sports Direct to extract every penny it can from its customers; there is no time for customer care or exemplary service in Mike Ashley’s World. For Ashley, the big game is solely the pursuit of profit – never mind the casualties.

When you apply for a job at Sports Direct, you are given a bog-standard interview assessing your basic human faculties. Can you work as a team with other people? Do you have goals and ambitions? Can you differentiate your Londsdales from your Airwalks?

Of course you can, and Sports Direct knows this. It is not difficult to enter the payroll of this company. But when you get there, the problems begin. The agenda becomes clear, and Sports Direct starts to betray inklings as to why many question its business practices.

During the induction to my career at Sports Direct I was told a number of things. Pretty much all of these things were concerned with the maximisation of profit at the expense of customer satisfaction. I was told, for example, that “own brand” products – such as Sondico football boots, Everlast sneakers or Dunlop insoles – would fetch a half-decent commission if you managed to persuade your hapless customer that they were in some way superior to their multinational competitors. And of course they weren’t – they were pretty terrible, made by some poor soul in the Far East for a pitiful wage just as the Nikes were – but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was clever lying, and any customer that couldn’t tell the difference between that and legitimate sales advice was prey.

At one stage during my initiation I was even told by my manager to lie if a customer happened to request a Nike football boot. You see, these didn’t fetch Mike Ashley as many pennies as his own brand equivalent. “If someone asks for the new Mercurials, tell them no, we don’t have them in at the moment – but we do have these Sondicos which are just as good and half the price!” Just lie, buddy! That’s a great model for any business looking to survive beyond the next decade!

This is not the essence of salesmanship. A salesperson should deliver the ideal product for their given customer, regardless of marginal monetary benefit to the company. And do not get me wrong; I bought into the Sports Direct mentality entirely. I swindled many tens of people out of twelve quid for the sake of some insoles or Karrimor running socks. I knew these things would fall apart within a couple of months of purchase, but I gained commission off of their sales, so it didn’t matter. And since I am good at speaking, I managed to sell quite a few of these inferior products. I’m sorry if my buyers are disappointed. As the old defence goes: “I was just following orders.”

This is the fundamental problem with companies like Sports Direct. They manage to convince their employees that the work is positive, mainly by emphasising the monetary incentives that specific sales bring to workers. But this isn’t what a business should be about. A business should deliver a service or product to consumers, but it shouldn’t exploit them. It is almost a double insult for Ashley’s behemoth to display its low-regard for consumers through misleading salesmanship, when the products themselves are exploitative, created by virtual slaves in Far Eastern economies for Western markets.

I’m not even a socialist; I believe in the power of capitalism to change lives for the better. But Sports Direct is a paean to all that is wrong with capitalism in the 21st century; it’s a chimera of commerce. Next time a Sports Direct employee advises you to purchase one of their rubbery insoles or feathery socks, take my advice: tell them to get stuffed.