DrDeth, have you ever trained anybody? Temped? Trained a temp? (i.e., someone who is not particularly motivated, who may be doing the job for the first time…) Trained someone who claimed to know the techniques but who didn’t, but they’d managed to bullshit their way past HR, or they were somebody’s cousin?
I’ve ran Liquid Chroma in 8 different labs. I can give you the theory for it, I can tell you which solvents are best for different separations, I can set up the columns.
But, whenever I got to a new lab and was told to “run an LC”, I’d say “ok, details on the LC?”
A: “oh, just do it normally”
Me: “I’ve done it normally with toluene as solvent, with water/alcohol solvent, with gradient solvent. Which normal is your normal?”
Eight labs. Eight places where I was told to do it “normally”. Eight. Different. Ways. Of. Doing. It!
There’s a supermarket chain that’s got 4 stores in my home town. When they replace the tills, it’s not done in the same day for all stores. The hipers go first; those of their tills which are declared “in good condition” go to replace old tills at smaller places while the new models are rolled out. There’s been times when those 4 stores had 3 different models of till. If a cashier in her late 30s with over 20 years on the job is having problems with till model changes, how can anybody reasonably expect someone right out of the street to “catch up” within minutes?
You overestimate the abilities of Temps. And, once again, I used to be one.
If you go to Best Buy, then Costco, then McDonalds, I guarantee you that each would have their own unique cash register. You may think that cash registers are idiot proof, but they’re not. You might also think that a trained monkey could run the register, but it’s not that easy:
“Yes, I’d like to buy the 2 year service agreement on that.”
“There was a sign on the shelf that said all items were 20% off.”
“Since that scanned wrong, don’t I get that free now?”
“That second item was a gift so I’d like a 2nd receipt with that.”
As far as answering phones, yes it’s quite easy to pick up the phone and say, “Best Buy!” It’s what comes next that proves difficult. You put a person unfamiliar with the store and its policies on the phone and they will do nothing but aggravate other employees.
Oh, come on! Is it really THAT hard for a temp to adjust to a new register, or for management to provide an adequate cheat sheet for things like manually entering discounts? Or to provide a FAQ sheet for the temp to refer to when taking phone calls? You say that we’re overestimating the abilities of temps, and if that really is the case, then I shudder to contemplate what’s going to happen if and when those people manage to get a “real” job.
I worked as a seasonal temp at a bookstore one Christmas. The agreed-upon term of employment was to be four weeks, with a possible extension if things worked out.
In that four weeks, I had to learn how to use their registers, which meant learning how to process at least five different payment methods. I also had to learn how to process sales and redemptions of their discount-club card.
On the shelving side, I had to learn their system of shelving, which bore no resemblance to reality. This meant that books found in other sections had to go into their proper location, which logically could’ve been in more than one section. For example, does a history of Christianity go under “Religion” or under “History”?
Finally, I had to learn how to manage the calendar kiosk, which operated under its own set of rules; the tills were different, so there was a different way to process credit cards, and the calendars were on a progressive discount, so we had to know how much the discount was before we could ring up the sale.
It wasn’t that hard to learn, but when you’ve got a line of people who want to spend money in your store and you’ve got employees who may only have been there a week, it’s not hard to see how a temp can get flummoxed. Cheat sheets don’t really help when customers are getting impatient; they don’t care that the cashier is only a temp and they really don’t want to see an employee looking something up that the customer thinks should be basic.
And, for the record, I’ve had “real jobs”, thank you very much.
Sadly, too often it is ‘that hard’ for management to provide these things.
I love this term: management. About whom are we talking? The dude who runs a single department in a multi-faceted store? The dudette opening and closing the doors at your local CVS? The first guy on the phone list for alarms at your local Best Buy? The Regional Manager who drives around questioning why you aren’t hitting your sales goals, as if you could magically make people walk into your store (note, in my long ago experience, store managers couldn’t advertise on their own, couldn’t sponsor local activities to promote their name, and didn’t have any control over stock and delivery)?
Hiring temps might be all well and good in some cases (if the training for that position doesn’t take too long), but what if there aren’t many temps available to hire?
Not everyone is in a depressed labor market. (Is that the right terminology?)
Here in Alberta (in my case, Edmonton), business is booming (mostly due to the high price of oil) and nearly all businesses are constantly hiring. It’s tough to hire workers, especially low-wage retail workers, if it’s easy to get a higher paying job somewhere else.
Virtually no one pays the minimum wage anymore ($7/hr). Heck, I think McDonalds’ starting wage is at least $8.50 or $9/hour, maybe higher.
A local McDonalds location (very busy downtown mall location) has to close some days (on just normal days), due to lack of staff. I doubt they’d be able to easily hire more seasonal labor when the mall is busy during the holidays. But I’ve still heard some customers whining “why don’t they open more tills during the lunch rush.”
Yeah, sure. Sorry to be antagonistic but that’s very easy to say and given your previous statements I’m inclined to not believe you. You really think upper management types listen to peons? They exist in their own little world, far from the madding crowd…
What I’m saying is that it’s not worth it to hire a temp for one or two unusually busy days, because by the time they learn the ins and outs of even the simplest things (e.g. the cash register), it’s too late to be of help.
Certainly that is experience and I don’t mind if I’m wrong, but your answer still smacks of not really knowing. Your response to me indicates maybe you should know better but apparently you don’t. I don’t know the details of your retail experience but the fact is that it isn’t nearly as easy as your previous answer portrayed. We are speaking of the Christmas rush.
Hiring, training, setting up extra temporary registers is all par for the course. It’s so easy to say, “Just the right amount of staff” and much more complicated to do. When every register has a line and there are customers asking for help you expect a store to have someone just answering phones? Not realistic I’m afraid. Do you expect a temp worker answering phones is going to have details on thousands of pieces of merchandise? Do you expect a temp to know what the customer is describing when they can’t remember the manufacturer. As I said. The customers in the store get first priority. Of course we try to get as many calls as we can but at some point the customers in expect to get that first priority. {as they should}.
Admittedly, don’t call and don’t browse, are exaggerations not absolutes. It’s venting aimed at the small percentage of stupid customers who can’t seem to figure out that you can’t expect the same kind of service during the Christmas rush. If you with your retail experience haven’t figured that out either then you still don’t know what you’re talking about, regardless of experience.
Maybe not. But many stores have a computer which lists stock on hand. And in the OP, he specifically ranted about dudes calling about “opening hours (including the hours over the Christmas/New Year period), and store location.” which certainly I’d expect anyone to be able to answer, given 10 minutes of training and a cheat sheet. Normally, we don’t get *too *many of those kinds of questions, but apparently the OP did. If those are driving the OP to distraction, hell- just bring in someone’s 16yo daughter for a few hours, plop them down with the cheat sheet and have them field those kinds of questions. We did that one season too. She was damn good on the phone, in fact (teen-aged girl, good with talking on the phone, who’d have thunk it? and it was one of the partner’s daughter, so it was all kosher.)
Then again, most checking/register work consists of routine sales, for which you can call a Temp agency and ask for a cashier qualified on any of a number of standard registers. I know, I have done so. One experienced sales person can supervise 3 Temps on registers, answering difficult questions, helping with weird little problems and the like. I know this, as I have had it done.
It’s true, I have not worked at the OP’s store, and none of these might work there. But his problems pretty well sound standard for the season.
THats a good idea and you were fortunate that it worked out. It is often more complicated than that. I think the OP was stressing, don’t call if you have another resource. If you can check the web then do that before calling and that helps you the staff and other customers. Plenty of people don’t think of that.
Your idea is a good one though and I’ll mention it to management. We have a privately owned but still rather large store. Someone with a few cheat sheets with hours, directions, specials could help.
Getting someone with some retail and register experience would help. The experienced sales person cannot supervise them when he or she is also fielding constant customer demands. That’s what several have expressed. Just walking through a department to look for an item for someone I am approached by several other customers with questions. Once all the registers are full and lines are forming at each one, all floor staff are with customers and the phones are ringing off the wall it’s just not that simple. That’s what the OP was about.
Your suggestions sound pretty useful. Most stores do what they can. It’s not so easy to judge what just the right amount of staff may be. Some days it’s is just enough. On the madhouse days it isn’t and that’s what the rant was about.
I worked in the liquor department of a major Sydney department store in an upscale area in the 80s. I used to take the phone orders for home delivery. One old arrogant rich bastard used to ring up every week for six cartons of beer. Yes folks, that’s 144 cans of beer a week. That’s up to him, of course, but this particular day he had just gotten up on the wrong side of bed and had obviously made a conscious decision to make my life hell. I was being polite, but nothing was good enough for him.
“My last delivery was late. What the hell?”
“I’m sorry sir. I don’t work with the drivers. I can’t help you with that. If you like, I can talk to my manag…”
“You lazy arse! You are unemployable! What do you do with your time?”
“With all due respect, SIR, I use my time to work for a living. I’m not the one who has time to drink a hundred and forty-four cans of beer a week.”
“Fuckcuntshittitsnipplesarse, etc”
I hung up.
A half hour later, my manager comes in.
The irony, of course, is that I’m actually in Australia.
A couple of other people here have already made the points but I’ll address a few others.
The “People calling up to get the opening hours” thing is very, very annoying for several reasons.
Firstly, phones are noisy bloody things, and the constant “Ring Ring! Ring Ring! Ring Ring!” All. Fucking. Day. is enough to drive otherwise sane people to depths of insanity deserving of a write-up in The Lancet. By the end of Boxing Day, it requires superhuman effort not to answer the phone with “WHAT?!” every time it rings. The fact that a good 35-40% of the calls were simply “What time do you close?”, it’s little wonder a lesser person might find themselves wondering how to make Shuriken out of DVD-Rs.
The customers in the store get mad because we’re answering the phone instead of serving them, and the customers on the phone get mad because we’re either too busy to help them (“Look, I’m terribly sorry, but there’s an infinite number of monkeys in here who would like to talk to us about this script for Hamlet that they’ve worked out- er, I mean, we’re a little busy at the moment, what with all the customers in here and so on, so I really, truly don’t have the time, inclination, or ability to embark upon an epic quest to the far corners of the store to find out whether or not we have a power adaptor for some weird brand of widget that your nephew bought back from India last week. The computer tells me that it’s never heard of the item you’re asking about, and so I find myself unable to alleviate your predicament.”), or else we put them on hold and forget about them. And then they call back on the other line complaining we left them on hold- and then Head Office and Area Managers complain that we aren’t answering the phone when they try and call us.
Pretty much every retail business I’ve ever worked in has their own, proprietary POS system, so it’s nigh-impossible to get staff pre-trained on them. The David Jones JOLT system is totally different to WOWPOS which is totally different to the MyerPOS system, which itself is completely different to what K-Mart and Target use, and which bears almost no resemblance to the standard cash registers used in small businesses throughout the country.
Bingo.
To be fair, the Area Managers for our region are pretty good, in that they’ve all worked at store level and thus know what it’s like, but we can’t advertise locally to boost our profile because Head Office have some kind of “Marketing Plan”- which letting us buy a 30 second spot on the local community radio station might throw into jeopardy, cause cows to give sour milk, result in darkness descending upon the land… you get the idea.
We’ve come up with a few Cunning Plans to drum up sales, but apparently it’s not yet possible to genetically engineer some kind of Albino Shouting Monkey, which means we have to resort to more humdrum ideas like balloons and music outside, and slightly more offbeat ideas like putting random signs throughout the store. (My contributions: a rather large “I Love Lamp!” sign in the “Lamps” section, the word “Wibble!” in large, friendly letters in various places where we had crazy prices on things, and a sign declaring our cheap computer games to be “t3h roxxor”.)
It’s all very well and good if you can find people who have that kind of experience, and you have management willing to pay the temp agency their fees, which double the wage the employee would otherwise earn.
However, my experience as a customer is that most seasonal help comes from students who are home on break and looking to make a little extra money. They don’t have the experience on different kinds of registers; in fact, they have no real incentive to really learn how to do anything since they know they’ll be gone in a few weeks anyway.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying that many managers don’t really care where their employees come from so long as they can meet their expense and profit goals. It’s cheaper to hire Joe College home from State than it is to hire Paula Professional from the temp agency.
Great!! There are those customers who for whatever reason, think they can heap abuse on those who serve the public and we have to take it. They should be shut down at every turn until they realize their shitty behavior will not be tolerated. Having a little money to spend isn’t a license to be a prick.
People can be in a bad mood and sometimes we’re at fault and they can vent a little without any problem, but verbal abuse should have zero tolerance.
I worked with a young guy at Sears that got a call from an irate customer over some bicycle issue. The customer cussed and he said “I’d be glad to help you sir just don’t swear at me”
The customer cussed again and without another word he hung up on him.
The phone rings and he answers. “Sears sportiung goods”
“Don’t you fuckin hang up …” {click} he hung up without another word.
The phone rings again. “Sears Sporting Goods”
“Don’t hang up”
“Don’t swear again and I won’t”
“Okay”
“How can I help you?”
I thought it was a beautiful thing. Without any anger he demonstrated to the customer that bad behavior would not be tolerated. When the behavior changed he helped the customer without any lingering malice. 100% correct.
and it was one of the partner’s daughter, so it was all kosher.)