I worked at a store similar to Home Depot in college and let me tell you, they don’t prepare you at all for the kind of questions people have. If they cared at all about investing in the customer experience (which they don’t) they’d hire some retired handymen or something. I seriously did everything I could to limit my voyages from the checkout counter to the employee area because there was a 90% chance I’d disappoint someone on the way.
Yeah it’s awful. I feel bad for those people when I go in there now. Sure they could take it upon themselves to learn everything but let’s be honest, for the amount they get paid it’s only worth doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
There’s a bit in Neal Stephenson’s early novel, Zodiac, that has always stuck with me. At a hardware store, everything has a specific purpose. The young guys working at the store can point you to that purpose. What you want is to find the old guy, who knows that everything there has a million alternative purposes.
I worked at a store similar to Home Depot in college and let me tell you, they don’t prepare you at all for the kind of questions people have. If they cared at all about investing in the customer experience (which they don’t) they’d hire some retired handymen or something. I seriously did everything I could to limit my voyages from the checkout counter to the employee area because there was a 90% chance I’d disappoint someone on the way.
What, giving you a pamphlet and showing you a video wasn’t enough to make you a hardware expert? (Menial jobs for massive corporations suck so much.)
Yeah it’s awful. I feel bad for those people when I go in there now. Sure they could take it upon themselves to learn everything but let’s be honest, for the amount they get paid it’s only worth doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
There’s a bit in Neal Stephenson’s early novel, Zodiac, that has always stuck with me. At a hardware store, everything has a specific purpose. The young guys working at the store can point you to that purpose. What you want is to find the old guy, who knows that everything there has a million alternative purposes.
They can’t hire old handymen when they pay just a few cents over minimum wage.