Seeing as the new one has Sandy Bridge and is significantly faster - and no more expensive - it's a no brainer really.
Is it really getting that desperate in retail?
- Thread starter Steedie
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Seeing as the new one has Sandy Bridge and is significantly faster - and no more expensive - it's a no brainer really.
Soldato
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- 26 Aug 2003
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I don't know how many times it needs saying, they don't make commission
Well I've bought countless cameras/camcorders/PC components by reserving online and have no problems collecting in store.
Just remembering the last thing i bought was a Blu-Ray player from Curry's and the assistant kept going on and on about an extended warranty .. so i calmly told him i was happy with my 12 month manufacturer's warranty and then asked him very loudly if he was on commission for selling extra warranties , he said he wasn't.
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I've had the opposite experiences in purple shirt land, some nerdy, beard carrying fellows too up themselves to give me any time or help. I was in at Christmas buying digital frames, looking to spend top dolla on a couple of them. The chap was moping around as if his dog died! They do always say 'hang on' and pointlessly bugger off for 10 minutes, though.
I've worked in retail for 4 years now, part-time and full-time in various roles. The act of being overly friendly, polite, educated on your product and at times even flirtatious does generate sales and repeat buyers - not hard selling which I'm generally opposed to in a store environment.
The worst culprits on the high street are by far Phones4U. Cheeky beggars the lot of them. I refuse to enter the stores now.
I've worked in retail for 4 years now, part-time and full-time in various roles. The act of being overly friendly, polite, educated on your product and at times even flirtatious does generate sales and repeat buyers - not hard selling which I'm generally opposed to in a store environment.
The worst culprits on the high street are by far Phones4U. Cheeky beggars the lot of them. I refuse to enter the stores now.
That's not good. It's annoying. There's a lot of ground in between the two extremes of ignoring customers and badgering them to the extent of following them out of the shop to continue trying to sell at them.
I work in a completely different menial job and the bonus scheme is equally fictional. It's more of an insult than anything else - the people far enough up the hierarchy to have any say in the matter are saying that we're too stupid to realise that at best there's a tiny chance that we might get a trivial bonus. It's like the cartoon cliche of a carrot tied to a stick tied to a donkey's head, with the donkey being so dumb that it will keep walking to reach the carrot in front of it.
Although one year, quite a few years back, they made a mistake and did a genuine profit-sharing scheme as a bonus scheme. x% of profit over budget was shared amongst employees, simple as that. Record profits resulted in shopfloor staff getting bonuses higher than their wages on several months and not much less on the remaining months. Fair play to the company, they stood by their word and paid up.
We never upsell and we never hassle customers for purchases, though, and we're not ordered to do so. In fact, we're ordered not to. The business is such that it's dependent on repeat business, so we need to be serving customers, not harrassing them. I'd hate to work in a job that required me to harrass customers or be sacked.
Soldato
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I'm not sure annoying customers comes under 'being good at their job'.
Personally i can't stand retail shops, only electrical item i've bought in one in 2 years has been some speakers which i walked in picked off the shelf and bought before someone could harass me, 5 mins and done
Ashamed to say it but I once worked for the purple shirt gang part time during uni.
Hated every second of it. Hated it so much infact, I deliberately made crap sales figures on the sales section so I would get moved to the customer service desk. Which is what happened eventually and I enjoyed my time there much more until I left. Repairing pc's, talking to customers with no 'sell, sell, sell' hanging over you and having lotsa arguments with customers is always fun. Looking back thou, it gave me a huge insight into how big electronic retail stores work and exactly why I have never bought anything from them for years and years. And never will. Do your research on the net, go and look at the items in a store for inspiration, dont buy them, get home and order off the net. Simple.
Why I hate them? The biggest margin they make is on the extended warranty and not so much the products themselves. I worked there for almost 3 years and all these are 100% true, I had these at some time during my time there...
(On the sales section)
Management wanted every salesperson who had not managed to flog the warranty to a customer to come see the manager before finishing the sale. A manager would then come over and badger the customer to take the warranty. Most of the time they would still decline, I even had customers about to hand over their money get fed up with being badgered about the warranty so much and storm out. Apparently then its my fault.
We were told pretty much to blackmail customers and say if you take the warranty I'll chuck in a pack of free cdr's or printer carts or a game etc. Even to the point of chucking in so much free stuff just to get the warranty sale. If you dont take the warranty you wont get the free goodies.
The purple shirt company once had a pay per month warranty scheme that could be cancelled at any time the customer liked. We were told just say the first month HAD to be included in the sale and they can cancel over the phone whenever they like so basically they HAD to pay the initial cover installment but to counter act that we could chuck in free stuff again to draw the punter into the sale.
It didnt matter if you sold a budget pc or enough goods to make a 2 foot long receipt worth a few grand, if it didnt have the extended warranty it wasnt a good sale. The managment were all a bunch of chimps.
All the laptops were stored in the warehouse within a big locked cage, every time one was sold, a manager held the keys so they had to come with you to get it out. An audit form was filled in to keep check of stock numbers of laptops. The manager would ask if extended warranty was sold with the laptop, if not, this is no joke, on more than a few occassions the customers laptop would be "accidently dropped down the steps" or quite literally slammed on the ground by the manager and they would say, bet they wish they took the warranty now! Sickening huh. The customer never knew.
It got to the point where I would recommend places to the customer to buy other than the store I worked for. Bad I know, but when I was a spotty teen I didnt really care. Eventually my sales figures were so bad they put me on a different section.
The list goes on but nothing suprises me about retail stores and the lengths they would go to in order to sell something these days.
Hated every second of it. Hated it so much infact, I deliberately made crap sales figures on the sales section so I would get moved to the customer service desk. Which is what happened eventually and I enjoyed my time there much more until I left. Repairing pc's, talking to customers with no 'sell, sell, sell' hanging over you and having lotsa arguments with customers is always fun. Looking back thou, it gave me a huge insight into how big electronic retail stores work and exactly why I have never bought anything from them for years and years. And never will. Do your research on the net, go and look at the items in a store for inspiration, dont buy them, get home and order off the net. Simple.
Why I hate them? The biggest margin they make is on the extended warranty and not so much the products themselves. I worked there for almost 3 years and all these are 100% true, I had these at some time during my time there...
(On the sales section)
Management wanted every salesperson who had not managed to flog the warranty to a customer to come see the manager before finishing the sale. A manager would then come over and badger the customer to take the warranty. Most of the time they would still decline, I even had customers about to hand over their money get fed up with being badgered about the warranty so much and storm out. Apparently then its my fault.
We were told pretty much to blackmail customers and say if you take the warranty I'll chuck in a pack of free cdr's or printer carts or a game etc. Even to the point of chucking in so much free stuff just to get the warranty sale. If you dont take the warranty you wont get the free goodies.
The purple shirt company once had a pay per month warranty scheme that could be cancelled at any time the customer liked. We were told just say the first month HAD to be included in the sale and they can cancel over the phone whenever they like so basically they HAD to pay the initial cover installment but to counter act that we could chuck in free stuff again to draw the punter into the sale.
It didnt matter if you sold a budget pc or enough goods to make a 2 foot long receipt worth a few grand, if it didnt have the extended warranty it wasnt a good sale. The managment were all a bunch of chimps.
All the laptops were stored in the warehouse within a big locked cage, every time one was sold, a manager held the keys so they had to come with you to get it out. An audit form was filled in to keep check of stock numbers of laptops. The manager would ask if extended warranty was sold with the laptop, if not, this is no joke, on more than a few occassions the customers laptop would be "accidently dropped down the steps" or quite literally slammed on the ground by the manager and they would say, bet they wish they took the warranty now! Sickening huh. The customer never knew.
It got to the point where I would recommend places to the customer to buy other than the store I worked for. Bad I know, but when I was a spotty teen I didnt really care. Eventually my sales figures were so bad they put me on a different section.
The list goes on but nothing suprises me about retail stores and the lengths they would go to in order to sell something these days.
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Soldato
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- 25 Nov 2007
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- London
Personally the work required to massively go about convincing people for like £100 extra per month is just not worth it really, regardless of how broke i am.
Well 2 of my friends both worked at 2 different electronics/ PC shops and they were both paid commission which was like 1-2% or something
Well 2 of my friends both worked at 2 different electronics/ PC shops and they were both paid commission which was like 1-2% or something
Well last Christmas i bought Mr's Albert a laptop from PC World and no-one mentioned an extended warranty to me. I did my research online , reserved it which was £50 cheaper than in store , then went to the store and simply paid for it ..... bear with me on this one but I'm 41 years old and been around the block countless times and am a bit of a gym monster and take no crap .... maybe the Purple Shirt Brigade just pick on little old ladies or people that don't have a clue .....
I remember my friend buying a laptop from the purple shirt guys 3 years ago. We didn't get the extended warranty treatment, was asked once, said no job done. But he kept on trying to sell Norton to us for £69.99. After countless times of saying no, we finally walked out with the laptop, as we got to the car, he ran towards us and handed Norton to us for free
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Soldato
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- 12 May 2004
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- England
Lol, reminds of my last visit to the asteroid like electrical shop I was just killing time before I picked up my new car from garage and I was constantly accosted by sales reps. In the end I just told the guy "look I will never buy from your shop I'm just killing time "
Lol
Lol
So true also.
Associate
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I got a pretty long winded lecture from "Halleys" electrical store. I was interested in their very large 3D screen and asked if they price matched... I'm sorry I did, he give me an economics lesson on how e-tailers are ruining the highstreet economy. I suppose they are all worried about their jobs!!
Sounds like a bad experience.
I hate it when people pester you constantly like that, I dont mind them coming up and asking if I need any help because if you know exactly what you want then its going to take them half the time to tell you if its in stock or not compared to you waiting to find out by looking around. Its when they try and palm something else on you which is the most annoying part.
When I worked in retail I had a customer who asked us if we had an item in stock so I went and checked for her. We didnt have it in so asked if she wanted me to ring our other store which is only a 20 minute drive away to see if they had any left to put it on reserve for her. They didnt have any left either so just politely asked if she would like our number to ring the next time before she came down to see if it was in stock.
Next day I got my morning briefing and got told she put a compliment in about me and how I was really helpful
Didnt even do anything but was the manner I went about it.
Used to hate the customers who would get angry though because you didnt have an item in. I once got told that I ruined his daughters christmas because we didnt have any in stock. Felt like saying no you ruined it by leaving it a week before christmas to do your shopping but no you had to be nice and say sorry for the inconvenience
I hate it when people pester you constantly like that, I dont mind them coming up and asking if I need any help because if you know exactly what you want then its going to take them half the time to tell you if its in stock or not compared to you waiting to find out by looking around. Its when they try and palm something else on you which is the most annoying part.
When I worked in retail I had a customer who asked us if we had an item in stock so I went and checked for her. We didnt have it in so asked if she wanted me to ring our other store which is only a 20 minute drive away to see if they had any left to put it on reserve for her. They didnt have any left either so just politely asked if she would like our number to ring the next time before she came down to see if it was in stock.
Next day I got my morning briefing and got told she put a compliment in about me and how I was really helpful
Didnt even do anything but was the manner I went about it.Used to hate the customers who would get angry though because you didnt have an item in. I once got told that I ruined his daughters christmas because we didnt have any in stock. Felt like saying no you ruined it by leaving it a week before christmas to do your shopping but no you had to be nice and say sorry for the inconvenience
No worries, Im going back a few years now, I'd like to think the purple shirt store / purple shirt group have got better in recent years but somehow I doubt it.