Actually it was last week. But I couldn’t post this least my wife see it.
I was looking for a nice digital camera to give my wife for her birthday.
Her birthday is right before Fathers Day so there are a lot of sales flyers the sunday before.
I look at the sales ads, do my research, and go to the stores.
Every fucking store, the same thing: none of the advertised cameras were on display! Best Buy, Office Max, Office Depot, Curcuit City! None of them!
Every other camera is there, but the ones featured in the ads are nowhere to be seen.
Then I show the ad to the waste of his daddy’s sperm working in that department. They stare at the ad like a deer in headlights!
“Duh…I don’t know anything about this.”
What? Huge ad in the sunday paper, a ton of the same flyers at the entrance of the store, and you don’t know anything about a sale in your department?
I got that in every store!
Don’t they tell the employees that they’re having a sale when they put out these flyers?
And how come every camera EXCEPT the one on sale was on display?
They had to go in “the back” and find the camera that was in the ad IN EVERY STORE I WENT INTO!!
And then they didn’t want to open the box so I could look at it because it would break the seal!
It sounds like a classic bait-and-switch deal. Too bad you’ll never be able to prove it, though, because they can simply say that they had a limited volume and they sold out before you got there, which is perfectly legit.
Yeah, except every store had the actual sale camera. The sales dick just didn’t know about the sale, and didn’t know where it was. They all had to ask someone else.
And at no time did anyone try to sell me something else. They just walked around with a stupid look on their face wondering where the sale item was.
Office max was the worst. They had 5 guys walking around, looking for it.
Exactly-- it’s likely not the clerks’ fault. The poor kid you saw in the camera department was probably assigned to the stockroom yesterday. It happened to me when I worked in a big chain store. I was a cashier, but one day found myself assigned to the garden center alone. People were asking me questions about plants, fertilizers and the like and I’m sure I had to seem like I was a complete idiot. (I snagged a book on plants from the book department and kept trying to look up the info they wanted.)
Yes, it’s bad customer service, but stores do it all the time rather than pay extra money to have dedicated personel in assigned areas.
Secondly, the fliers are usually put out by the corporate office, not the stores themselves, and management sees no reason to acquaint the staff with what’s on sale and how many they have/where it’s located. Perhaps they figure that the floor people will research it themselves, but they overestimate the dedication of people they treat like shit and underpay.
[grumpy old lady] Back in my day, when I was store manager of a Video Chain Much Maligned on the Dope, we had monthly meetings to discuss upcoming promotions, computer updates, changes in procedure, etc. Then, in addition to the meeting, I’d check in with each CSR on shift: “Hey, remember to offer preorders for Titanic.” or “Did you get all that stuff about the new PVT stickers?” Then, if they looked confused or blank, I’d go over it with them before customers walked in the door.
How hard is it to mention to the guy in cameras that the Panasuckit XYZ is in the flyer this week and he better check to see that there’s one on display?
And how the fuck do they expect to sell any if there’s none on display - if there’s no display model, you fucking make a display model out of the first box you find!
Retail can be fun at times, but mostly, it kinda sucks. Especially when you don’t know something because you haven’t been trained and people think you’re automatically an idiot because you work there, and even more of one because you don’t know something because you don’t work in that department. When I say, “I don’t work in that department,” I don’t mean, “I’m too lazy to look,” it usually means “I can try to help you but I don’t have a CLUE where that item is and you’re better off finding somebody who has one.”
I can imagine how frustrating it is for customers. Imagine it from our side!
Former retail drone checking in here. I used to work for OfficeMax (left in December 2000 for greener pastures), so I am not at all surprised that they’re still pulling this shit on people. I hated working on Sundays (it was nice to have them off once I had enough seniority that they gave Sunday shifts to the other guys) because that’s the day the ads came out. Invariably, the most prominently featured items in the ad were never in stock, or if they were, we only had two or three units available and they’d be gone in the first hour. The earlybirds who waited for the doors to open were lucky if they could snag one. For the rest of the day I’d have to put up with bitchy, cranky customers complaining about having driven over an hour to get to the store (uhh, did you think about maybe calling the store first? Don’t assume that the store will have it just because it’s in the ad). Then for the rest of the week I’d have to continue putting up with more complaints, bitching and whining. “But it’s in the ad!” I’d hear over and over, along with accusations of using bait-and-switch tactics and threats of lawsuits from “my lawyer”, who probably doesn’t even exist. I couldn’t blame customers for being pissed, but it pissed me off that the suits at the corporate offices have probably never so much even set foot in an actual OfficeMax store, let alone worked in one and have no fucking clue what goes on down the line. Nothing was done to ensure that we would have sufficient stock on hand by the time the ad was put out. Oftentimes, the ads and sales were planned months in advance, so coordinating inventory to accommodate the anticipated demand from the ad was difficult, and we poor, lowly grunt workers at the bottom of the chain had to deal with all the bullshit.
God, I am so glad to have escaped from that damn place.
Huge ad in the sunday paper, a ton of the same flyers at the entrance of the store, and you don’t know anything about a sale in your department?
If so, I am looking forward to them.
Sounds like you knew what you were doing, a quality in short supply in retail, sadly.