I’ll start off with saying I’m glad that I no longer work at this place. I used to work at a retail store that primarily focused on office supplies. Desk chairs, printers, staplers, paper, some computers, etc. When I started it all worked well. I was labeled essentially as the tech sales lead. I would be in charge of the tech department and whenever a customer would be in the department I’d be assigned to essentially hound them from the time they stepped into my department until they left with our sales quotas.
I admit that I am not a salesman. I don’t believe in talking people into buying things they don’t need. Albeit this was a temporary job so try as I must while I worked there until I found a new job after I moved to a new town. All things were going well until the store traded assistant managers with another store. The guy we got in our store was a piece of work. He was a lifer. He was with the company for 20+ years and was promoted to assistant manager not due to his people skills. But because he was great at selling stuff to people. And that’s where his problem laid.
Being one of the only other full time employees in the store he was my direct supervisor. He’d come in during the shifts he and I’d work together and give me about 5 tasks to focus on throughout the day when we didn’t have customers. Then about an hour later he’d find me working on one of those said tasks and complain to me that I wasn’t focusing on something else that he didn’t even mention. Like I should have read his mind.
An important issue to mention is that we are directly across the street from a Best Buy. Also our big ticket items are computers, which we don’t sell but about 10 in total in store, which most are laptops. So it’s difficult to get someone to even be willing to buy a computer from us in store let alone buying anything else as well. Which part of our sales components go into what we call ‘double dipping’. Which is if someone comes to buy something expensive like a printer or computer we upsell other things we have in the store so that we maximize separating money from people’s pockets.
With being across the street from a Best Buy we would have difficulty with doing this. One moment my boss would be complaining to me that I needed to improve my ability to ‘double dip’ while also the next day or two he’d vent to me that when I was away and he was trying to sell to someone that they didn’t want to buy other things from him either.
Another issue that I couldn’t help but mention is that we only had so many people in the store at once. Like 6 employees. A cashier, a manager or two, someone in charge of inventory being loaded on the floor which was also the guy in charge of online pick up orders, one person in my department and another in print orders. There were times when there were multiple customers in my department. I just couldn’t help them all and yet I was supposed to like I was told that if Iw as helping someone and I saw one one else in may department I had to break away from the person I as helping and tell the other person to ‘please hold’ while I was finishing up with the person I was helping. They rarely if ever scheduled more than one person in my department at one time. Which meant that if someone came in and picked up a printer and bought it without me able to assist them that was my fault for not upselling.
This all boiled down to a customer bought some big $1,000 sale from him on a day that I wasn’t working. Then the next day I was there and he wasn’t. They bought this huge software package from us that also involved backing up their hard drive on a flash drive in case of some kind of surge or damaging effect so they wouldn’t be completely fucked when they had to replace or repair their computer. For whatever reason the transference of this to the flash drive was not working. This ended up causing the customer to return everything because they were visiting from out of town and they wee to leave for their home town that day that I was working. They didn’t have time to wait around for us to fix the issue.
This was not going over with my manager well. Afterward my supervisor pushed to fire me as soon as possible. Which included giving me three write ups, two of which would give me a month’s time to fix. I just figured screw it. Luckily I found a new job before I was officially fired and never looked back.