Dignity Somewhere...

I need to rant.

* Like all of my rants, this is the first/only draft and is heavily unedited. The flow is disjointed, but what should be said gets said.

I’m starting to remember why I hate retail jobs: The dishonesty of my charge. As a retail employee, I am paid to sell services and products to customers whose problems may or may not require said services and products to fix. At Gamestop, it was Edge card subscriptions and reservations. Granted, they each had their own strong points, but part of my job description was to push them at customers who wouldn’t benefit from them. I’m finding that CompUSA operates very similarly, though we don’t offer a discount card or a deposit program; we’re required to push the CA Security programs on customers who typically already have Norton or McAfee or AVG or some other anti-virus that they paid for. I also get commission off of selling labor plans to customers, whereupon they leave their computer and go away for a day or two and hope the computer operates properly when they get it back.

My personal goal while working in a computer shop is simple: BE HELPFUL. You would think that the follow-through would be just as simple as the goal, but I’m finding more and more that it is not. Of the customer computer issues I find myself faced with, it’s ever-so-frequently a user error and I can fix it in a minute. CompUSA would have me charge the customer under a Flat Rate Plan ($130 for Desktops or $180 for Laptops), have the customer leave the computer in the store for a day or two only to have the technician reinstall a bad driver, when I could simply do it in a minute on the counter with the customer watching. Doing that, I can instruct the customer on what happened, what to avoid in the future, and how to fix it should it happen again. I don’t attach a value of $130 to that minute of my time, so I don’t feel like I should charge the customer for the quick fix and lesson. The customer leaves with their minor problem fixed, and they’re happy. I was helpful, and I’m happy.

Don’t get me wrong: If a customer has a genuine issue with their machine, I’ll check it in and charge them for it in an instant, but only after I try my damnedest to save them money; whether I try to fix it myself (not in my job description), or sell them a replacement piece of hardware, install it for them (we do that part for free most times), and instruct them from there. My superiors might call that a failed attempt to profit, but I see it as a success: Another happy customer.

Same goes for the CA programs. There are a few flavors of CA: CA Anti-Virus (AV), CA Internet Security Suite (ISS), CA Mobile Security (MS), CA Online Backup (OB), and CA PC Tune Up (PCT). I have never personally used any of these products and can easily name a better (and usually cheaper or free) piece of software to replace the CA suite. Regardless, my superiors track ability by tracking the amount of CA programs sold daily, and they are not exactly pleased with me. Not that I blame them: Technically, they ARE paying me to follow their orders, and their order is to sell CA and sell labor. I’d rather be helpful.

I seem to hold a slightly different view of economics than they do. Their view is to “Get the money off of the market by selling items NOW. We’ll work with the customer, but make sure they leave with their wallets lighter.” That’s a perfectly valid view and works well in big cities where people might come to a place just to shop around and not come back. The view I hold is much more small town-y: “Treat customers well, and they’re more pliable. When customers are more pliable, they’re more willing to part with money. But if they don’t part with the money today, you’ve treated them well and they’re more likely to come back and spend money later than if I treated them as a walking wallet.”

A customer’s time and money is just as valuable to them as it is to my employers (often moreso). When a customer knows that they’ll get quick and effective service, they follow the view I hold: Happy, pliable, return. Thus, the issue I have with checking in machines to the tech shop is that they don’t get their computer back the same day. For many customers, their computer is how they run their business, or where all of their precious personal files are stored. With computers as prevalent as they are today, customers need them back as soon as possible. If they have to leave it overnight (or as was the case over the holidays, for a week or so), they are unhappy. They are not pliable. They might only return in order to retrieve their machine, if they leave it at all. Then nobody is happy.

It’s no aid to the labor services proposal that the work isn’t always performed correctly. When a previously happy customer comes to back to me to pick up the machine they left off, I turn it on and prove to them that it works the way it should. When I power on a machine and there are still issues with it — despite being worked on under a Flat Rate Plan (which is supposed to fix just about everything, hence the name) — they customer is no pleased with the service we have provided. Occasionally, the customer will have to leave the machine with us for another stint. The customer is less happy. Even though we do reworks for free, the customer got bad information and unprofessional service from a company they trusted with their money and their property. The customer is unlikely to return. On top of that, the customer spreads the bad news to their friends, and they too are unlikely to come to CompUSA to have their computer serviced.

My real problem with the “Get the money, get it now” virtue is that I simply am no good at lying. If a customer comes in and I fix a minor issue, of course I’m going to suggest that they get an anti-virus (if they don’t have one already). If their computer runs in the least bit slowly, I’ll offer CA PCT. If they mention that their photographs are important to them, then maybe CA OB will fill that hole.

Sometimes the customer bites and buys a copy of whatever program it is. Other times, the customer will ask, “Is it actually a good program?”

“Well,” I reply, “I haven’t used it myself. But I’ve had plenty of customers who bought it come back with no complaints.”

“Is there a better program out there?”

And I just can’t stop myself. “Carbonite, AVG, CCleaner, Dropbox, LoJack, Mobile Me, Mozy, Windows Defender…” and the list goes on. The customer passes on CA, and I don’t blame them. I was helpful to the customer.

This is not to say that I want to always run counter to my employer’s wishes, nor that I don’t want to be helpful to them. This past week I spent all of my free hours and many sleepless nights studying programming macros for OpenOffice so I could improve an in-shop procedure for everyone’s benefit.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that the system is broken nor that I have a solution that is better than CompUSA (that already went bankrupt once in the past), but there are improvements that can be made.

Jobs like the one I had at Gamestop and this one I have now at CompUSA are the epitome of why I can’t wait to get out of sales and into a profession where my ability is measured not my what I can trick people into buying, but instead by how well I perform tasks. With my upcoming Associate’s Degree in Crime Scene Tech, I’ve opened up my horizon to such a profession wherein I can keep my job and not get in trouble by being genuinely helpful.

All I want is to make people happy.