The problem with being knowledgeable and actually caring is that Fry's management doesn't give a crap if you do or if you don't.
And they don't pay diddly-squat for the knowledge. The pay scale at Fry's is terrible and every time you turn around, the commissions are being cut. Plus, even though it's not supposed to happen, some PIC or other will let a customer return something you sold them six months ago and you have to give back the commission. (That's because the Fry's POS software is crap, but I could expound on THAT all day without repeating myself other than to say the Fry's POS software is crap.)
I was the first person at the Burbank store to pass the A+ certification test. Kapil Mirchandani told me that he personally would reimburse me the $190 if Fry's wouldn't (you figure out how much $190 means when you're getting $7.50/hr and working less than 40 hours a week). Well, Fry's wouldn't because I was officially on the Computer dept staff even though I was working about half my day in the service dept, and the knucklewalkers in San Jose used that as a technicality: We only reimburse Service dept staffers. I'm sure glad I never expected anyone to actually cough up the money.
So, did they give two hoots in Hades that I was knowledgeable and diligent enough to go pass that test? H*ll no. And then I got told I wouldn't be hired by the Service dept. Seems they used another technicality: I had to do my aisle in the Computer dept, so I wasn't actually in the Service dept all day long, so they claimed I was "unreliable." Wow, working two departments and shifting back and forth between them on call all day long--yeah, that's really unreliable, and let's not forget those long hours of TSR either.
Fry's weekly "training" is sitting in V-con listening to some buyer with a thick accent tell you the same thing week after week after week (usually, we're cutting the spiff on this stuff). Once in a while a company rep will come and talk for an hour about some new product and hand out some freebies, but I don't know that that really constitutes "training."
I racked up a long list of very positive "first in store" achievements in my three years at the Burbank store and very little of it was acknowledged by the company in any positive way. When Fry's starts treating its employees with respect instead of thinking that they're all thieves and crooks, THEN maybe being a caring, knowledgable person will be considered something else as a good one-way ticket out of Fry's.
Posted on Apr 17, 2003, 5:26 PM from IP address 207.151.38.122