The First Day (Wish It Was The Last?)

Like any job, the first day is usually the do or die feeling.  The feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of material that a new employee is presented with can be daunting.  Many potential employees don’t survive even that first day after finding out what everything is all about.  I can’t blame them—it is hard sometimes.

Besides what appears to be an endless slew of paperwork to fill out, there is the notorious training videos to watch.  Way back in the days of Woolworth, the videos were on VCR tapes and there were not that many of them.  Short and sweet training this way..done in a couple of hours.  Same was true with HQ because they really didn’t care anyway.

Staples was a very different story.  It seems that there was endless videos to watch.  Some were on videotapes, others were on CDs.  A full 8 hours was needed to get through it all and even then all the training was not completed.  It would take another 2 to 3 weeks to complete all the required training to be considered fully trained.  The biggest difference between Staples training and everybody else’s was that Staples training was interactive.  This meant no sleeping or “ho-hum wake me when its over” training.  The biggest problem with Staples’ interactive training is that many of their so-called quizzes resulted in the old “ask a question and have no right answer there”.  This made taking quizzes almost impossible.  In fact, a couple of quizzes actually had to be purposely helped by management because they were absolutely impossible to pass otherwise.  I think this was intentional just to discourage employees and make things they want to learn confusing and incomprehensible.

One such video that is now part of the orientation is this one:  It was done as part of a store meeting in 2005 and made many people angry:

Originally distributed to store meetings in 2005

I think its interesting that someone actually was able to film this without getting caught or be fired for posting it. Thanks to the anonymous donor for the link to this video.  It should also be noted that many other retailers have videos similar to this, but the message is clear. STAPLES HATES UNIONS AND DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT OR ELSE!!  Sounds like thug retailing to me…more on that attitude in future posts…

Next up:   Dressing for the Role