A Man and his Penguin

I’m a little bit frustrated by the policies of the new place I’m working at.

The policy is: If a customer asks for a discount, give them 2.5% off.

2.5% not only sounds like a tiny discount, it *is* tiny. Customers are so used to getting bigger discounts from electrical stores, furniture stores, etc; that they’re very dissatisfied with it. They think I’m a miser, or that I’m greedy, when I don’t come up with a bigger discount; and they either walk out or decide to go to a different store next time.

The profit margins at the new place are over twice that of the electrical store I worked at before, if you assumed that everything was sold at the ticket price (doesn’t happen much in electrical!). So why be so miserly? Give the customer a 10% discount and everyone wins: You make a sale, the customer’s been given a good price for this type of goods and knows it, the customer is willing to come back, and you still make good GP.

The other thing I’m frustrated about is that I have to depend on one person to put through sales on the computer. If he’s busy or in the toilet, both the customer and I have to wait. Just teach me the system! Even if I’m not allowed to handle cash (which I understand the reasoning behind), at least let me put the data into the computer! There’s a whole “double-entering” and “Chinese whispers” system - I have to get the customer’s details and write it on a pad along with the things I need put into the computer. Then I hand it to the cashier who types the exact same information into the computer.

And I don’t get any credit for my sales until I get given a salesperson number. As a full-time staff member, I deserve to be given the credit. And as a full-time staff member, the management should be able to see that my performance is up to standard and that they are not just paying me for kicks. I’ll be blowed if I’m going to sell any warranties until I get a salesperson number; why should my commissions be given to some other staff member whose sole role in the sale was just to take the cash from the customer?

The last thing is, apparently we’ve all been told to pounce on customers as soon as they walk through the door. That’s not how to do things. People resent that as being pushy. Give them a minute to look, and then they’ll know what exactly they want help with. If you ask them straight away if they want any help, they will almost always say “Just looking”, or maybe ask “Where’s xyz?” before then saying “Thanks, I’ll just have a look”.

If you give them a minute to look first, and then introduce yourself not with “Can I help you?” but with a friendly comment relating to what they are looking at or doing (i.e. “If you want to lie down on the mattresses to try them out, please do”), then you’re much more likely to have the customer like and trust you. Then they are more likely to give you the answers to your questions, or volunteer information; and therefore more likely to get the sale.

If you can’t think of a folksy and friendly comment, the question “Was there something you were looking for particularly?” will more often yield information than “Can I help you?”.

I’m not grouching about the people I work with. I certainly landed on my feet there; they’re all good people. One lent me a book he had about selling skills, which I appreciate even though the tone of the book is a bit like one of those spam e-mails promising to give me advice to “get any girl you want”.

Yeah, I actually don’t mind my job, but I’d like a little more freedom in order to make more sales and maximise efficiency.

———-

My computer is running a bit warm lately. 40 degrees at idle? Not so impressive; I wonder if the stock thermal paste is breaking down? I did make a mistake when I first applied it; I took the heatsink off once and didn’t reapply the goop. It hits 60 degrees under load; you’d imagine that the cooler would run much faster to get the temperatures down? Under load, the fan only goes about 100RPM faster than at idle.

The extra fan I installed has had a marked effect on the temperature of my hard drives, fortunately. My 500 gigabyte HDD is 7 degrees cooler. My graphics card is running cooler than it did last summer, too.

Of course, I want to upgrade to Intel Core i7 once the prices go down! If AMD’s “Shanghai” microarch turns out well, I might cross-grade; who knows? I suspect I probably won’t, because I don’t believe AMD’s next lot of processors will be anywhere near as good as i7. But we can always hope that things will get better for the AMD.

Speaking of Shanghai, I read that Red Hat were trumpeting a victory in virtualisation; they said that they had migrated a VM between “three architectures”. No they frigging didn’t! They migrated it between three microarchitectures, which I didn’t think would be difficult at all. I mean, they all use the same instruction set, and the process of virtualisation is intended to abstract the exact hardware anyway. It’s not like they migrated a VM from a Playstation 2 to a Core 2 and then to a Macintosh G5! That would be a massive feat of engineering!

In other news, I want an EeePC again. They’re only $299 for the 7 inch Linux version with a Celeron processor. Arrow Computers. I’m finding excuses for thinking about it; like on the train yesterday I could have done… stuff with it. Watched Doctor Who on a 7 inch screen rather than a 1.7 inch screen
I won’t get one unless I really find a proper need for it.

I’ve also noticed that the pace of Ubuntu Intrepid development has slowed down. It’s been over 24 hours since the last update in the Proposed repository. So many bugs, so few fixes. No updates have fixed my wireless or suspend. Boo hoo.

I hope the Ubuntu devs put an earlier version of Banshee into the repositories, the current version is utter crap. There are now bugs that stop you from being able to rip multiple CDs at the same time, which is all I used it for really! You can’t add metadata to a CD before ripping it - useless, because then you have to manually rename files after applying the ID3 tags! All the options have been stripped out of it - making Rhythmbox look like Amarok by comparison. Terrible. But at least I’m getting better aquainted with Exaile.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 4:05 am and is filed under Backstory, Open-source application software, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.