I hate my new job.
For what its worth, here’s another exciting installment of my Live Journal. I’m afraid with all my other writing and my job, I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this. My friend Caitlin, who turned me on to this Journal crap, doesn’t even read it anymore. Maybe, some day it will be of some interest to someone.
So, the theme of last few entries has been “I hate of my job.” Things haven’t changed that much since the last time I was here, except that I told “We Don’t Care Inc.” to take their job and shove it and got myself a new job! But guess, what? I hate this job too. Initially, it seemed like it was going to be okay. The first three days went pretty well. I was in a large class with other new hires and we got what they call “training.” I was very impressed by how together they seemed to be.
We learned about all the great benefits we were eligible for, even though we were part timers, which was a lot better than WDCI, (Anything would be since they didn’t provide any;) but the rub, we later found out, was that we had to wait 6 months for them to kick in and when they did, there wasn’t any way we’d have any kind of check left after all those great benefits were deducted.
So, this is one of those jobs for people who already have two or three jobs but none of the others have benefits. See, for you all in the world of academia or those of you who only work in retail for extra CD money, most people have to actually work for a living and the way things are nowadays is, you are not going to get a full time job any where and one part time job will not pay the rent or anything else.
This job really sucks!
So, right at the moment I’m stuck with this crappy new job. And boy is it crappy! On my first day, the store had 10,000 customers go though it (This is a really big store I’m not exaggerating.) They put me out on the sales floor with absolutely no training, so predictably I was completely steamrollered.
When I finally saw my boss on Tuesday, he took four days off in a row including the entire weekend; he looked surprised that I was there. It was as if he didn’t expect me to make it through the weekend.
Now I understand why: other than me, there were two other people and most of the time they were either gone or busy, so I had no one to go to when a customer asked a question that I couldn’t answer, which was every question. We were told we wouldn’t see the sales floor until we were fully trained, but that was a lie.
People think retail employees are stupid or something, but they wouldn’t do any better if they suddenly had to answer a million questions about a section they’d never been in or a product they’d never seen. Just try it. Go into a store you’ve never been in and pretend to be an employee. See how the customers treat you!
Cattle calls:
This is the thing new thing companies do: They hire a bunch of people, way more than they’re actually going to need, and they see who sinks or swims. No need to waste time and money training someone who is going to quit in a week when they find out what a scam the whole thing is, right?
Apparently, the calculation is that the lost sales from customers not finding what they want or just pushing their cart away and walking out in frustration because they can’t find anyone to help them is an expectable business expense when weighed against the higher expense of paying an adequate amount of staff to actually serve them.
People don’t want to pay for anything, but when they go into a store they expect to be served on hand and foot. Most retailers talk a good game about customer service, but they don’t really mean it. If the service sucks because the two people that are doing the work of five are either not trained or too disgruntled to care anymore, they just replace them with two others and hope the propaganda works on a few of them. If not, they just they just push them through the great retail meat grinder.
Note to customers: We don’t give a shit about whether you find what you’re looking for or not. We get our crappy pittance regardless of whether you buy anything or not. Instead of relying on someone making $7 an hour to make your shopping decisions for you, how about doing a little homework before you come in? Now, there’s an idea. Have a nice day!
So, the theme of last few entries has been “I hate of my job.” Things haven’t changed that much since the last time I was here, except that I told “We Don’t Care Inc.” to take their job and shove it and got myself a new job! But guess, what? I hate this job too. Initially, it seemed like it was going to be okay. The first three days went pretty well. I was in a large class with other new hires and we got what they call “training.” I was very impressed by how together they seemed to be.
We learned about all the great benefits we were eligible for, even though we were part timers, which was a lot better than WDCI, (Anything would be since they didn’t provide any;) but the rub, we later found out, was that we had to wait 6 months for them to kick in and when they did, there wasn’t any way we’d have any kind of check left after all those great benefits were deducted.
So, this is one of those jobs for people who already have two or three jobs but none of the others have benefits. See, for you all in the world of academia or those of you who only work in retail for extra CD money, most people have to actually work for a living and the way things are nowadays is, you are not going to get a full time job any where and one part time job will not pay the rent or anything else.
This job really sucks!
So, right at the moment I’m stuck with this crappy new job. And boy is it crappy! On my first day, the store had 10,000 customers go though it (This is a really big store I’m not exaggerating.) They put me out on the sales floor with absolutely no training, so predictably I was completely steamrollered.
When I finally saw my boss on Tuesday, he took four days off in a row including the entire weekend; he looked surprised that I was there. It was as if he didn’t expect me to make it through the weekend.
Now I understand why: other than me, there were two other people and most of the time they were either gone or busy, so I had no one to go to when a customer asked a question that I couldn’t answer, which was every question. We were told we wouldn’t see the sales floor until we were fully trained, but that was a lie.
People think retail employees are stupid or something, but they wouldn’t do any better if they suddenly had to answer a million questions about a section they’d never been in or a product they’d never seen. Just try it. Go into a store you’ve never been in and pretend to be an employee. See how the customers treat you!
Cattle calls:
This is the thing new thing companies do: They hire a bunch of people, way more than they’re actually going to need, and they see who sinks or swims. No need to waste time and money training someone who is going to quit in a week when they find out what a scam the whole thing is, right?
Apparently, the calculation is that the lost sales from customers not finding what they want or just pushing their cart away and walking out in frustration because they can’t find anyone to help them is an expectable business expense when weighed against the higher expense of paying an adequate amount of staff to actually serve them.
People don’t want to pay for anything, but when they go into a store they expect to be served on hand and foot. Most retailers talk a good game about customer service, but they don’t really mean it. If the service sucks because the two people that are doing the work of five are either not trained or too disgruntled to care anymore, they just replace them with two others and hope the propaganda works on a few of them. If not, they just they just push them through the great retail meat grinder.
Note to customers: We don’t give a shit about whether you find what you’re looking for or not. We get our crappy pittance regardless of whether you buy anything or not. Instead of relying on someone making $7 an hour to make your shopping decisions for you, how about doing a little homework before you come in? Now, there’s an idea. Have a nice day!