Customer Service Desk – A Punishment That Lasted Years

It all started on February 2, 1989.  Yes, Groundhog day of that year.  This was probably the worst thing I ever could have ever done.  Let me explain:

There was this female employee who I liked and and I thought she really liked me too.  However, she had issues that really made it difficult to express those feelings.  So that night I had decided to stay in Woolworth with her and the assistant manager, who was also on of her best friends as well.  The reason for staying in the store was that the entire store was going to be waxed.  This took until 3 am the next morning.  The 3 of us spent the entire time in our restaurant talking about random stuff and having very interesting conversations.  It seemed that all went well even though this threesome was at best awkward.  (To those interested:  This is the closest thing I have ever had to a REAL DATE---I am VERY serious about this!).  I will say that it is kind of weird being in the mall at such a late hour when everybody has left and the only ones wandering the mall are the night janitors. 

Even though all seemed well, I soon learned it really didn’t go well at all.  In fact, it went way wrong.  Since the girl never spoke any negative thoughts of me, it didn’t dawn on me that something was very wrong with what happened that night.  Over the next couple of days, she called out sick.  Not thinking anything really special about it, I just continued on thinking all was fine.  Then it happened.  She decided not to return to work at all on the 12th of the month.  At this point, the thought ran through my head—WHAT HAVE I DONE!?!

It wasn’t until 2 weeks later that I would receive my “punishment”.  The punishment was that I was to take over one of the jobs that she had.  One of them was working in the candy section, the other was working the customer service desk.  It was the most dreaded place in the store to work and certainly I wasn’t greeted with open arms, at least not initially.  Everything was ok during the day as the people were mature enough to handle me and could train me properly.  The night people were a very different story.  Two girls, Tara and Nicole, were about as polar opposites as anybody could get.  Tara supported me to the point that this girl actually was trying to date me and Nicole hated me so much for getting rid of her best friend.  When these two worked together, it was guaranteed fireworks would go off.  They hated each other for their different feelings about me and the girl I made quit.  Never in all my retail years did I see a battle like this thankfully, which probably explained why my training was done during the day and not at night.

At the time I started training for this position I was already still doing my front-end supervisor work so I spent days sometimes having a half-day upfront and half in the back of the store at the customer service desk.  The duties at this counter included regular cashiering, cleaning the doors and chrome bars along the entrance, straightening up around the curtain area, and worse of all returns and exchanges.  I will discuss returns and exchanges in a future post.  The way Woolworth did them and how Staples handled them were very very opposite.  Kind of like Tara and Nicole were to each other – a sort of good vs. evil approach to them.  Gee, I wonder who was who?!?  The punishment that kept on giving for over 20 years.

Up Next:  Staples’ Customer Service Approach – A Prisoner’s Story

My Next Position – Front End Supervisor or Is That Stupid-Visor!

Approximately 6 months after starting at Woolworth, I got a new position.  The position was of a front-end supervisor.  This position was recommended to Bernie (the store manager) by Warren (the assistant manager).  The problem with Bernie and Warren was that they hated each other to the point of never speaking to each other.  This was more of the lack of personality of Bernie and the more outgoing personality of Warren.   This probably why I didn’t last in the position for no more than a year.  It wasn’t me – it was the problem between them.

As a front-end supervisor, my duties included keeping cashier lines moving by opening registers as needed, getting cashiers change as needed, making sure everybody got appropriate breaks, count drawers to make sure that everything was always ok, voiding bad transactions amongst other things.  This fairly exhaustive list was most all of the duties I had while as front-end supervisor, but the position did at times be stressful.  This was mostly because of the incompetent cashiers (read my previous post on that one) and the fact that we were quite busy especially during the week.  This was at a time when people actually shopped at the mall, sadly not so much anymore.

I was finally glad when I left this position and never looked back at it, even though I missed the thought of having power of others.  I guess I couldn’t have it both ways. 

Since I never stayed at HQ long enough, I never got past the cashier position which was absolutely ok with me with this company.

Staples, however was a different story altogether.  Approximately 3 years after I started at the company, the company eliminated the position from all stores.  The position was retitled a few months later as Customer Service Lead, a much less powerful title but virtually all the same duties except with no managerial pay level and no salary.  Sad to say in the nearly 13 years I worked for the company, I was never asked or even considered the position even though I had previous experience in that capacity.  This would not be the only position I was shut out of as I will explain in a future post..  In a way, I am really glad that I was never offered the position as nobody ever seemed to last in the position anyway.  But then again, does anybody last long at any position at Staples?

Up Next:  Customer Service Desk – A Punishment That Lasted Years 

New Blog Created!

I have created a new blog that deals with virtually every other topic that is not retail or Staples-related.  NO topic is off-limits and every topic will be a surprise and no clues will be given as this blog will be free form and free from any sort of order. 

Bookmark the blog and visit today!

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louisbrownusa.wordpress.com

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Let’s Start Cashiering!

Virtually all retail jobs start with training as a cashier.  This was the starting point of all three of the companies that I worked for.  However, where I went after I was trained as cashier varied from company to company I worked for.  Most employees hate being a cashier quite possibly for one of a couple reasons:

• You stand in one spot for a long period of time, usually hours at a time.
• It gets monotonous to keep doing the same thing over and over.
• The customers are rude.

The third reason will be discussed in a future post, but the first two are the most important as the shear boredom leads many employees to quit just after a few weeks.  However, the biggest issue is that most employees just can’t figure out how to give back change.  As funny as that sounds, they just don’t get how many nickels, dimes, pennies, or quarters back to a customer.  Add to that the paper currency and it just accumulates to trouble. 

Another intimidation is the register itself.  Too many buttons or too many functions lead the employee to hitting the wrong key more often than they should.  Add to this that employees have to scan merchandise and then bag it and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

For example, I believe that a good cashier can retain concentration while scanning merchandise and maintaining a conversation with the customer at the same time. However, many times the employee gets so wrapped up in a conversation that they don’t pay attention to what they are doing. Such is the point that in the last 10 years I have accumulated over $200 in free or discounted items from stores because of the incompetence of the cashier. Needless to say, that if somebody was overcharged they would demand a refund. However, if they were undercharged, the customer just runs away laughing their head off knowing how stupid the cashier really was! Only once in my 20+ years in retail did a customer ever come back because they were not charged for an item and that was a large printer that was sitting on the floor by the cashier. Of course this happened at Staples and this cashier was promptly fired without ever given another chance. So much forgive and forget!

Another bad thing about cashiering is the training of other cashiers. Normally I was the sucker, I mean employee, who trained most of the new people on the cash register. As part of their training, they had to use my cash drawer to ring up transactions. The bad thing about that is that many of these people were amongst those who can’t count change back to a customer thus creating a shortage in the drawer. And guess who got blamed for problems like that? ME!! Sad to say that managers never researched who was on the register when a problem occurred so it is just as easy to blame everybody and have it go into their permanent record. Ah, you can smell the manager incompetence! I became an easy target for all the register problems since I was one of the very few full-time cashiers. 

On the other hand, I have found cashiers that have personalities of a dead dog.  They act robotic and seem totally disinterested in the customer much less their job.  These people are even worse to deal with than the excessive talkers as they are very unhelpful and add to the fact that many of these companies are failing.  If you get lousy service or deal with lousy employees, the company becomes lousy as well.  As if places like Borders would have learned that and Best Buy should learn that, but then again nobody ever learns from their mistakes in the retail world.

Up Next:  My Next Position – Front End Supervisor or Is That Stupid-Visor!

Easier to Find Waldo Than a Store Employee!

Previously, I had discussed the issue of finding an employee on the sales floor at Best Buy.  Sadly, they are not alone in the lack of customer service department.  The former Circuit City was notorious for its lack of help both on the floor and at the register.  The big joke with them was that they NEVER had an open register despite having 4 of them just feet away from the customer service desk where everything in the store was basically done.  This created lines when they were busy, but usually they had no customers around because nobody ever got helped anyway!

Last year, I visited a Kohl’s Department Store and noticed that there was at least 30(!) people in line waiting for various things at the customer service desk.  No longer were there any cash registers at the front of the store like there was—everybody was in one long line.  Whether it was for making a purchase, doing a return, or wanting to use one of the many registry services they offered, one line was for everybody and nobody looked happy at all!

Now even stores like Walmart don’t have door greeters anymore at certain hours of the day and when they do have them, they don’t greet people anyway—they just stand around looking dumb.

So what has happened to the elusive help?  I like to call it corporate greed!  Surprised – maybe not!  This is the trend nowadays and it is not a good trend.  Employees are being cut and customer service is affected to the point that customers just stop shopping altogether at some stores.  

I remember back in the 1970’s going to some stores and employees were waiting at the door for their customers to enter.  The employee would then offer their concierge service until the customer left the store.  Certainly these stores were high-priced stores and were not the type of stores that I ever visited.  However, their existence is nearly extinct and for good reason.

On the other end of the employee extreme end, I present the following example of excess.  I remember shopping at Target one night after work just before closing and walking down one of the aisles of the store.  The aisle had about 6 employees straightening the shelves, but not a single one of them would come over and ask if I needed help.  They were all too busy on their own conversation to even bother with me.  Naturally, I didn’t find what I was looking for and wasn’t going to bother the employees because they seemed disinterested.  I ended up leaving empty-handed.

Ironically, I have noticed that Staples stores are a feast or famine with their customer approach.  The store that I worked for was aggressive at helping the customer whenever possible, sometimes even going to the point of being unreasonable.  The unreasonable part for me was the expectation of greeting incoming customers while not facing the door and helping other customers.  The last time I check I didn’t have a rubber neck nor was I secretly Plastic Man.  Unfortunately for me, Staples and the dimwit manager Shawn Nichols thought otherwise.  This was yet another lousy excuse used to fire me for those of you keeping count.

Over the last few years, I have visited other Staples locations where nobody greets you at the door and nobody is around to help out on the sales floor either.  Maybe these stores have ripped the pages out of how Circuit City and Best Buy did/do business.  We can only hope that Staples winds up the same way that Circuit City did and the way Best Buy is going. Maybe that’s why Staples employees dress in the same colors as Waldo does from the “Where’s Waldo?” series.

Up Next:  Let’s Start Cashiering!

Commentary: Why Having the Student Loan Interest Rate Go Up is a Good Thing (Like You REALLY wanted to hear that)

As I celebrate (or not) the 20th anniversary of my graduation from college, it is time to reflect back on the days of my own student loan problems.  Those days were not fun and times haven’t changed anything.  America is also celebrating 1 trillion dollars in student debt and this is certainly not a good thing either.  While the government is strangle-holding the interest rate on the passing of where the source of keeping the rate low has put the entire issue on the fore front of thousands of people.The real question in all this is who is to blame why this is all happening in the first place.  I like to spread the guilt around and here is my list in no particular order.

• The student – Oh yes, they can pick any school in the world to go as long as they are rich enough to afford to go there.  Debt forever is what they can expect and certainly the possibility of finding a job after graduation will be next to impossible.
• The parents – They can nowadays set up a college savings account almost from the minute to when they arrive in the world, but most parents can’t afford to fund the accounts so the college fund will end up being underfunded.  What’s worse is that many of these parents are too young to even afford to have a child (or worse children) in the first place.
• High school teachers – It would be nice that more of them would care about the student’s best interest rather than what their union wants them to do.  It used to be that teachers actually cared to some degree, but now it is a feeling of no longer caring at all.
• High school guidance counselors – I remember my high school guidance counselor gave me very poor advice and sort of created huge hole that would exist between what I would leave behind in high school and jump into at college.  Sad to say, I was not at all prepared for what I was to expect.  To help compensate for my future costs of college, my counselor set me up with the possibility of getting at least one scholarship.  In the end not only did I not get a scholarship but the students that got them was spread out only between about 5 people and most got multiple ones.  Certainly not a fair system.
• U.S. Congress – They created this mess and now they don’t really want to get out of it.  Just another proof of a do-nothing Congress.  Need I say more about them.
• College counselors – The one I had in college cared more about advancing his own career than trying to advance the students he should have been counseling.  Ironically, he left the university once and for all the same year I graduated for a job with Sun Microsystems.  He was gone for a sabbatical an entire year with them around my fourth year at the school.
• College professors – Some of these “professors” hardly knew their subject matter and instead spent more time talking about their various philosophies rather than the topics they were hired to teach.  A good example of this was the huge gap that was left between my Calculus A course teacher and my Calculus B course teacher.  They used the same book and sadly the Calculus B teacher started his semester about 50 pages after the Calculus A teacher should have ended at.  Of course, I ended up taking the course twice because of this gap and even with 2 or 3 third-party books I still really didn’t pass the course the second time either.  However, the teacher made a huge mistake by making the announcement that “everybody passed this semester which hasn’t happened in a long time”.  Not only was this not true, but he had to change my grade possibly from the chance of getting sued.  After all with so many witnesses, he would be held accountable for making a false statement about the status of his class.  Another example is the teacher that always kept the students a much shorter time than the scheduled 2 ½ hours that the class met on a Thursday night. Sadly, since this was a prerequisite to another course, I failed the follow-up course because I was not prepared for it.
• The courses themselves – I will admit that the quality of courses that I had during my years at college ranged from the dopey to the down-right impossible to pass to the obscene.  One course that I took my first year was “War and Peace in the 20th Century”.  While this course sounded interesting, it was filled with so much boring information and graphically explicit films that it would make HBO look like the Disney Channel.  It really was that bad.  In today’s politically correct world, it would certainly be better to have a rating system to what the course would contain rather than get big surprises after it was too late.  Another problem was that since many courses were prerequisites of others, it was impossible to get into some classes when wanted so this added to my extended stay with the school.  This problem in addition to the fact that many courses didn’t really lead to the course that followed.  Also, since the college required so many core courses, this took nearly 3 years to fulfill this obligation alone given the limited availability and scheduling conflicts of needed courses. 
• Work-study leaders – I never could get into a work-study program during my college years because our family income was too high to qualify for it.  So, I had to get a real job in the outside world and it was not in the field of my education.  I have a degree in Computer Science and with no job experience I became retail guru instead at 3 different companies over 20+ years.
• For-Profit schools – While I never went to one of these, its apparent that they are sometimes cheaper than state run universities, but getting a job after graduation in the chosen field is just as bad if not worse.  Many of them claim job placement, but even a job at McDonalds can be considered job placement. Therefore mission accomplished for them!!
• Your bank – So you take out the school loan at your favorite bank and they say the loan will be handled locally and that there will be no problem paying back the bank.  Then comes the big surprise!  The bank sells your loan to a third-party and you end mailing payments to them instead hoping that they get properly posted.  Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t – there was no science of when the holding company would decide to make a payment late just because they wanted to.
• Collection agencies – Call them what they really are:  arrogant lying bastards.  During the time that I was trying to pay off my loan (and still going to school by the way), the company that held my loan sold it off to another place.  Here is the kicker though:  Nobody told me who held the loan so I didn’t know where to send the payments.  So for about six months of non-payment, I received a letter from a collection agency demanding that I pay the whole entire loan in full.  I couldn’t even set up a payment plan with these people.  When I called and asked why it went into collections, they said I didn’t pay and I explained to them that I didn’t know who to send payments to.  Their response was “I still should have send payments out even if it was to the wrong company”.  Great advice for someone who has money to just throw around just for fun.  It is this type of circumstances that make people NOT wanting to pay off their student loans and believe men I 100% agree with that. 

Of course there are many others that can be blamed for the huge student loan debt.  The important thing to remember is that the student loan process is a ruthless problem later on.  I would not have even bothered going to college knowing now what I went through.  It was definitely not worth the cost or aggravation.  With today’s college costs being about 6 times greater than when I went over 20 years ago, going back to school is definitely forever out of the question.  In fact, when I have people ask me if I would recommend college to them, I would tell them that if they can afford to go without getting any student loans (or any loans at all), then go to school otherwise try and find a descent job somewhere, but not Staples though.  They hate educated people!

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