Know what I hate? The incessant "nice act" that I have to put on for work. Now, I'm not an angry person. At all. I'm not talking about being friendly to normal customers, because that's what I would do anyway. What I'm talking about is the idea that the key to being a good salesperson is being needlessly positive in situations where that is not beneficial
at all. My experiences with this last night can be distinctly summarized in two points:
1) We're currently all being trained in that Kevin Graff retail junk at the moment, and most of it is completely useless to a store that only sells unnecessary impulse items like we do. The biggest thing that ticks me off about it is that we can apparently
never say anything negative about our products, which is total garbage advice. I've only had somebody thank me for a movie recommendation once or twice, but I've had loads and of people who thanked me for not spending six bucks on something that was terrible. Customers appreciate honesty more than they do positivity. Last night I talked somebody out of buying Brüno by warning them that it was so bad that several customers asked for their money back after renting it, and though everyone walked away satisfied, I'd probably get chewed out if the district manager were in.
2) Last night somebody called to complain that they weren't paying the fees from the games they returned late. They claimed that their aunt had dropped them off on Friday and that they must have been sitting, not checked in, in the dropbox for four days. Now, since everyone seems to be convinced that when they drop their movies off they enter some kind of labyrinthine catacombs beneath the Earth, I'll just point out that the drop slot just leads to a small box. It takes all of two seconds to stick your head in and see what's in it, and we check it five times a day. There is no possible way for your films to sit there, unnoticed, for an entire weekend. His games were on the cart of checkins, right in front of me. There's security camera footage that clearly shows him returning his games less than an hour beforehand, and as soon as I check them in there will be a computer record showing what time his stuff was checked in. Both he and I know that he's lying, and I have a mountain of evidence against him, yet I am required to be nice and not just call him out on his bullshit like any reasonable human being would, so instead me and the manager on duty sit there and listen to him be an argumentative dick over the phone for an hour while nothing gets done and decent customers get ignored.
Fortunately the manager on duty last night hates this kind of asshole even more than I do. He now has a fifteen dollar charge and four pages of warnings on his account.
