Last night three mates from Australia, who were in town for a business convention, ran into Pencils to scoop up 3 Toshiba laptops. They primarily wanted to watch movies on the 24 hour plane journey home, but the sale price didn't hurt either... until Matt started to ring them out. Of course they weren't going to buy any bullshit extended warranty or Microsoft Office, so Matt was looking to take a big hit (loss). The one guy who most resembled Crocodile Dundee slapped down his American Express card and told Matt to put all 3 computers on his tab. Because the sale is over $1000 (or some predetermined bullshit amount) Matt that tells him, "I need to see 2 forms of ID." The customer whips out his passport and tells Matt his driver's license is back at the hotel. "Sorry, Matt says, "I can't authorize this without seeing 2 forms of ID." Now I'm hoping these guys are smart enough to each pay for their own computers separately, which will circumvent Matt's little deception. Thankfully, I see Matt's shit-eating grin disappear when the other 2 guys whip out credit cards and say to Matt, "We'll each pay for our own then." If only Matt had pissed them off enough to get a "Bloomin' Onion" rammed up his ass.
This is wide spread throughout the company. Every manager I know(maybe 14), would rather not sell a computer than sell a computer with less than $200 of attachmments. If the customer won't buy the attachments managers can expect to get a nasty email from the district manager and the regional vice president. Its fucked up, but this is the culture the company has breed over the last couple years. VIBE is supposed to counter act this behavior, but the DMs and RVPs still only care about service plans.
ReplyDelete-Manager
VIBE is Staples' version of psychological warfare on the customer. Here at Pencils we employ HYPE or soon to be renamed to JIVE. Instead of "passbyes" we do "drivebyes" where one associate pushes another in a shopping cart and we blaze by the customer and distract them as we throw stuff into their cart.
ReplyDeleteIn my store we used to not sell PC's if the customer wanted to buy it with no attachments. The exception was black friday. I guess customer's grew wise to this and would really annoy the managers by staying in the store for 45 minutes or more asking what could be done for them while the manager was doing 10 other things. Then someone told the DM what we was doing and he happens to work in our store along with 3 other DM's for different districts. (Our store is a regional store - meaning it contains DM's offices, HR offices, Mobile tech supervisor and business account reps). This stopped immediately once he found out, even though our store still got yelled at for having low ESP numbers and tech sales.
ReplyDeleteif we had normal prices without all these bullshit coupons, we might actually make a profit. half the sales we get have no attachments because people dont need 500 dollars worth of extra crap.
ReplyDeletehttp://staplerlife.blogspot.com/
companies that use laptops to boost top line, no-profit sales don't make sense to me. so you increased sales but made no money? you're imbeciles. claiming that it brings more traffic is BS too.
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