[ubuntu-uk] High street store handbagged by angry pensioner

[David King]

PC World staff are sometimes the worst, they often do not have a clue 
about anything beyond the written tech specs on the packaging of anything.

If you want to know about a product, if it works with linux, you really 
have to google it first before going to the shop, as salespeople are 
generally not tech-savvy, they are just hired to sell rather than 
educate or inform.

Which is a real shame, as shops would sell a LOT more if their staff 
actually knew something about the products, like they used to many years 
ago. But today they just hire monkeys and pay them peanuts, rather than 
train staff (which costs money) and get more sales (which would pay for 
the staff training), but managers these days are probably too 
short-sighted and stupid to actually know how to make money.

I digress here, but a good example of poor staff/management was told to 
me by a friend who tried to eat in a restaurant recently. It was not a 
posh restaurant, just a sort of average place but not a dirt cheap one 
either. He sat down and was looking at the menu, then a waitress came 
over and told him to leave as he was wearing tracksuit trousers. He got 
up without a fuss and on his way to the exit looked for a sign that 
might have mentioned what attire a person should have to eat there.

Finding no sign, he asked to see the manager, who just explained that he 
could not eat there because of the way he was dressed, and the 
restaurant had a legal right to throw him out. He said they should have 
a sign, but the manager did not care to listen.

There is a recession on, but too many managers/staff cannot see that 
they need customers and so act in a very bizarre self-defeating way. The 
restaurant was otherwise empty, and my friend left to eat elsewhere.

It is as if these people want to fail, they want to lose their jobs and 
see their employer fail and go bankrupt, and themselves become poor. It 
is no wonder that the restaurant my friend visited was empty, the staff 
were probably desperate not to do any work and just keep people out, 
profits down, and out of a job with the restaurant out of business. The 
food was probably rubbish too, as I expect the chef was too lazy to cook.

I wonder if the salesman at the John Lewis store mentioned in the 
letter, and staff in other computer shops, think the same way.


David King



Harry Rickards wrote:
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> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 05/27/09 16:48, Sean Miller wrote:
>   
>> Yes, I'd be interested to hear the reply.
>>
>> I have very little time for salespeople at these places... they only
>> know what they're taught, they're not expected by their employers to
>> be experts simply to sell whatever is on offer on the shelves... I
>> remember once going to PCWorld to try to buy a CD-Rom drive (shows how
>> long ago it was) and being told there was a world shortage and no
>> internal ones existed.
>>
>> Their failure to stock wasn't my issue, really - but the teenager
>> "selling to me" knew no better.
>>
>> Sean
>>
>>     
> I remember once considering buying a Yoggie Gatekeeper (basically an
> embedded computer running a firewall that connects via USB). On the box
> it says that it supports Linux (well unless there's another OS with tux
> as a logo...), yet the salesman said it didn't. The funny thing is that
> the device actually *runs* Linux itself.
>
> - -- 
> Many thanks
> Harry Rickards (GPG Key ID:646ED06A)
>
>
>