House of Fraser is closing half of it its stores in the UK. No wonder they got to this situation with the kind of unfriendly staff they employ. We were walking past the Reading Oracle store on a Sunday afternoon and noticed a beautiful black dotted dress displayed on a mannequin. We went into the store and asked one of the employees where we can find this dress in the store. And she politely refused to help saying "I am sorry, I am at this counter, you can go around the store and look". Our jaws dropped at this attitude; not that she was serving any customer at that time! And my wife was quick to respond with "thank you, you have been very helpful". There were not many people in the store that afternoon. We walked away further down the store and asked another employee at the till. And this employee was not attending to any customer at the time we asked her. Her polite reply was similar to the first one "I am sorry but I am serving at this till". "Serving who?" was the question we asked ourselves and walked further down. At this stage my wife wanted to walk out of the store. She stayed in because of me as I wanted to buy that dress for her as she would have looked great in it! On my insistence she went further ahead and asked another employee and this time my wife mentioned to her that we have been trying to get help and no one seems to be willing to help! the employee said that she will call the manager and went on the phone and spent 2 minutes talking to someone. And then she asked which display window it was. We told her that this was the downstairs display window. The employee went and looked at the dress and came back and said that she will call the manager. She went on the phone and was talking to someone for about 5 minutes and we were asked to wait for the manager to come. After a few minutes she walks to us and says "Let me go and have another look" . she went down and returned after 5 minutes only to tell us where we can find this dress - not that she would come with us to show the dress. We went to the said section of the store only to find that she had directed us to the wrong dress! Three employees, thirty minutes in the shop and they couldn't get the dress we asked for! Best to close down the business! Please spend some time, energy and budget on training the staff on the basics of customer service.