Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How to Survive Working Retail”.
Uh hi lldd: how would you handle the soulless aspects of a job where you are asked uh, where you asked to do? I’M assuming asked to do things that feel slightly less than your moral standard for pushing an addon purchase. You know they don’t need um. I mean I generally ignored whatevers. We were offered back when I was at NC or you know what we were told to push and that got me promoted uh, because my customers loved that they got good stuff. That was really good and uh at a fair price.
I can’t promise that it would work that way at every company. I think at a lot of companies that would just get you fired um, so it all kind of it all come kind of comes and look. I’M not going to pass some kind of moral judgment and say well, then you should stand up and you should you know hand in your resignation or you are less of a man like that’s that’s ridiculous. I understand that everybody’s got to eat and at the end of the day, um business is always what it is um if there is, if there’s no margin in desktop PCS uh, your your store is going to tell you hey, try to attach a printer, because there’s Good margin in that and if all you ever did was sell desktop PCS with no printers um the store would ultimately go out of business um.
You know you could try to you. Could you could try to talk to management? Say: hey, maybe, should charge more for PCs and then they would say well, um, good luck with that. The store down the street has lower advertis prices on their PCS and their reps do a really great job of upselling monster, HDMI cables or whatever the you know. Modern equivalent of that is and uh if we aren’t in business they’re going to be the only ones left. So I guess the ends justify the means. I guess all I’m trying to say is.
This is clearly Shades of Gray and I’m not here to pass any kind of moral judgment um. You know. I always found that for me uh, I was able to create better relationships with my customers by educating them um, helping Point them in the right direction, regardless of what corporate had to say about it, but NC just wasn’t organized enough to discipline anyone for not getting With the program when it came to pushing products, so I don’t know what to tell you uh yeah, when I used to do sales at Best Buy before I got into the Geek Squad side of things um. I would actually sell a lot of stuff um, because I knew what I was talking about. I guess um and I I would usually avoid upselling things in general, but you also can’t ignore that people might want those things so making them aware that they’re available is not a bad idea like I wouldn’t push someone to buy a uh a case for their Laptop like a carrying case or a backp backpack with a sleeve or the laptop or whatever, but I would make sure they knew knew that we had them. Yeah education, yeah education is key. Yeah um and you know cuz, like people might actually be kind of pissed. Like I I would you would you would hear of people that would come back in and be like. I like scratched whatever and who knows if this is real or not, but they’d, be like I scratched my thing, I’m like upset about this and then someone would be like well, you could have bought a case and they’d be like well. Well, no one told me yeah yeah, I mean that’s something like like.
If you uh, if you tell someone, if you ask someone hey, do you want Apple Care and they’re like no, then you might go? Okay, that’s totally cool um. Would you consider a case? I? I think that’s a very reasonable way to to offer an attach without being a pushy jerk about it right. It’S it’s all in the presentation too, you can. You can present options.
I think that’s a really good point without you know cramming them down someone’s throat and you might not like said thing, but the customer might and they might still want to buy it, yeah, just educate them yeah and there’s. There are certain lines that that I didn’t want to cross in regards to things that we sold, that I thought were really stupid or absurdly, overpriced or whatever, and I’m not necessarily suggesting this. But I do remember one time I walked into the NX Langley store, still wearing my Best Buy stuff and one of the ncx people behind the desk asked me if I was the person that kept sending customers there um, because I was um and that there was Just there was certain things that we would sell that would be at Best Buy at that time that were really overpriced and really bad, and it’s not that I didn’t think like. This is not actually one of the examples, but I’m going to use printers as an example. It’S not that I think printers are a bad idea for the customer. I just think we have terrible ones that are going to break, are bad and are overpriced. So I would send them somewhere else in that case. Well, cables were a classic one. That people would s like. I I worked at an ncx that was near a Best Buy and we would often have people walking through the door. Looking for a cable that wasn’t stupidly, overpriced power cables, yeah were like insanely, expensive and people. You want $ 25 C13 power CA.
Are you kidding me yeah, the one that comes free with my rice cooker, like yeah yeah? I would send people over for power and HDMI all the time. Um, oh yeah, but like other stuff like I I I had a sale with some dude. I I broke like what we needed to sell for the entire weekend to one person on like a Friday um, because they came in looking for, like a laptop for themselves, ended up deciding to like outfit their whole office and got like software packages for all of Them got all this other kind of stuff because he was like excited because I told him actual things about actual laptops that, like no salesperson, had told him before um, and then he was like asking about like. Oh I. I need a solution for this thing and I’m like well, you can buy like software and he’s just like brain explode and end up spending tons of money. I didn’t like upsell him yeah. I just made sure he knew and I understand there are there’s a lot of gray in there but, like I don’t know, he had a great experience and left very happy like I didn’t. I didn’t push it when he was paying for it.
He knew exactly how much it was going to be. He wasn’t surprised by the bill. That’S the line right. If someone else talked to this person and was knowledgeable and gave an assessment of how they were treated and the deal they got, would they still be happy with how you treated them and the deal they got? If the answer is yes, you’re good I’ve left a store spending more than I planned on and been happy stoked about it and I’m a very cheap person yep. I I spent a fortune on my mattress yeah and I’m thrilled about it, because I have never had an experience like that buying anything ever. Oh, he told me all about it and they’re gone now, and I’m sad yeah, like buddy literally like took two pieces of the same foam and like got down on hands and knees. While we were lying on this layered foam mattress and was like no that’s slightly out of alignment, we actually need to adjust like this middle layer and like got this one and was like no with this one flipped over yeah, okay yeah. There we go like like calibrated uh, the two sides of M and yvon’s Mattress to each of our bodies like it was crazy.
Yeah cost a fortune. Actually, you know what not even that much more compared to going and buying one of the S Brands uh from like Sleep Country or whatever um super super super happy. Unfortunately, no, I don’t have a name. It was a.
It was a factory in on the North Shore in Vancouver that no longer appears to exist and that kind of makes sense, because a buddy who helped us was uh on the elderly side of things, and I think they, like. We chatted with them for like an hour and a half or something like that that, like he was he wanted to transition to his kids running it, but hey, maybe that didn’t work out for whatever reason, so they don’t seem to be there anymore G yeah, which Is sad because I actually, I tried to call them to go and just got a a no no line. Uh gerer said not advocating for commission Bas sales, but there is little incentive for a Best Buy employee to upsell, as there is. No commission pay sales there.
So Luke did all that out a passion and not for money. Yeah. I made nothing from it like genu get spiffs, can’t you I didn’t get anything. I don’t know I’ve never worked at Best Buy at that time. I got nothing. I think they have spiffs. It was so bad that I remember we had uh for like some thing that we did. I don’t remember what we had like a burger day and they like ran out of buns, okay and the the GM of the store refused to like buy more buns.
So I walked to Walmart on my break and bought buns with my own money to like feed people at the store. Okay, like they didn’t care about us at all, not even slightly, but I liked my job. I liked the people in my departments that I worked with the computer sales department and the Gees Squad Department were cool um.
I didn’t like, like almost anyone else in the store. Customer support was cool. Actually, the people at the front customer support, um and yeah people are saying no, no spiffs in their time there. So nope, not a thing. Wow yeah there’s like actually nothing, that’s kind of stupid. No wonder nobody walks up to you to help you yeah, all right! Cool yeah uh at Shield 934 and float plane chat, says as a former blue shirt.
I can tell you that some major brands, Samsung and LG, will release specific models of TVs just for the holiday season. You can usually tell, by the model number Samsung’s normal naming scheme is aaxx for their subq Leed TVs, um for Holiday TVs. This gets a little bit weird like uh letter letter, okay, whatever or some different thing, they’re effectively the same TV, but one has an MSRP of 650 and the other has an MSRP of $ 850 with a sale of $ 300 off yeah. That’S that’s not quite what they were asking about before, where they were asking if there’s like a different quality, but yes, that is 100 %. Something that exists is slightly different model numbers even from one chain to another, to make it much more difficult to um cross shop and price.
Compare around this time of year, um, that’s even of away from the holiday season or like the shopping season. It’S pretty common to see slightly different part numbers at a Best, Buy and out of Costco and on you know the the manufacturer website, uh, so that you are eliminating uh price matching requests because your retailers are going to get on you if they’re getting a bunch Of price match requests from their competitors, who might have a better price, whereas you can kind of slip that stuff under the radar, if no customers flag – and it doesn’t show up – is like yeah, we got like 300 like it would happen at NC uh. We we had monitoring for this, where we’d get like 50 price match request for something and the the first thing we’d do is we’d call up the brand, be like yo. What whoops I got the timing wrong on that is going on with with this.
Why do they have better pricing than us? How are they doing this deal because everyone’s buying from the same person like okay, like Ben Q, for example, had one rep in the entire country? So if someone’s got a Ben Q monitor for $ 50 cheaper than us, then who sold it to them Ben Q? Obviously so who are we going to call and yell at about it? Because we’ve got a warehouse full of these monitors that are now not moving or worse yet moving at a loss, because our stupid competitor has a better price than us like that’s that’s the dynamic at play, right, yeah, .