Hat tip to BadAstronomer for the link to this video. I promise. It won’t go where you think it’s going.

Hollywood Declares Themselves

I’m in retail. When this job is done and I go on to another one it too will be in retail. I LOVE retail. Even when the customer is a lying jerk who is trying to screw us… and yeah, it happens… even then I love retail because I like people. I like working with people and I like knowing that I’ve helped a customer. That’s why it kills me to have someone tell one of my customers “I can’t help you. You’ll need to call the office.” I couldn’t have been more embarrassed if I’d walked out of the bathroom with my pants down.

Our Job

We are customer service representatives. We work with customers and work to keep them satisfied customers who continue to shop with us because we provide a pleasant shopping environment where they are able to find the stuff they want at a reasonable price and are helped by a friendly sales staff who cares.

We are the front lines, second lines, and third lines of handling customer issues that might arise. Defective product, credit card typos on the credit card machine, wrong item given on a rental, all these are normal things that can happen and should be handled with a goal of making the customer happy first and foremost. We make mistakes and we need to work hard to fix them, going out of our way to make the customer happy. We need to work to fix them, not make the customer work to get the problem fixed.

Unusual situations will arise that the sales associate has never encountered before. These situations are exactly what the manager cell phones are for. We, as members of management exist within this company to take those unusual calls and find a solution within the context of making the customer happy and the rules that exist in the company. Some rules can be bent for customer satisfaction. Knowing which ones and how often is part of our job as managers.

When in doubt escalate the call. Call your boss and dump it in their lap. We all have cell phones and you’re invited to let the customer know you’re escalating the issue and are working hard to resolve it if they’ll only be patient. Then call up one level. If they don’t know they answer they will call up one level. We, in the field, will get a solution to our customers’ issues. It’s why we are here. It’s why we have cell phones. It’s the most fun and exciting part of our job for me.

If we ever just tell a customer they need to ‘call corporate’ or ‘call the office’ because ‘I can’t help you,’ then I, as a supervisor need to evaluate what exactly we’re doing wrong if we won’t help the customer when that is, as I see it, everybody’s primary job responsibility. When we abdicate our responsibility to the customer we actively work to destroy our credibility with our customers and that’s unacceptable. We will be the best in customer service, product, selection, and value, period. I really hope that we all see eye to eye on that goal.

Rich G.
October 1, 2008

I recently bought a new car (much love) and needed to test out the CD player (Your mental transmission fall out from the change of gears? Don’t worry. We’re still on the same road, just in a different lane.) so I went to Best Buy and grabbed Pearl Jam’s Pearl Jam. So far I’m liking it, and to answer the burning question in everyone’s mind: yes. the CD player worked quite nicely. When I got home and was reading the review on Amazon, mainly to see if this was their most current album or not I found this line from the review incredibly annoying, and the progenitor of this post.

On its eighth studio release–and first since 2002–the band socks away the adventurous experimentation that dogged some of its most recent records to investigate a post-September 11, war-ravaged world overflowing with urgency and significance.

It’s been 7 years now. I feel like our period of national mourning should be over. We have to stop living in the horrific images of 7 years ago. We have to be the country that existed on September 10th. A line I hear over and over again is that since September 11th the world has changed. That’s a lie. The world has not changed. There are still people who like us and people who don’t. There are oceans full of fish and creatures who have no concept we exist. There are families out there making a living in countries all over the world who have no concept of whether or not we were attacked or not. Mind-boggling, but all true. The world didn’t change. We allowed ourselves to change. We haven’t acted to counter terrorist attacks. We have reacted to them. Initially that was fine. How could we not, after being hit so staggeringly, so abruptly, so blindingly? We were hurt and angry and the most armed and dangerous country in the world. SOMEBODY was going to get hurt back. And they did… they have.

Seven years though. Seven years later our system of spying on our own citizens in the name of national security continues and increases unabated. Our internment camp, sorry, too loaded a word, concentration camp, no… that’s too loaded too… Our detention of people against whom charges have not been proffered, and convictions have not been obtained continues. Perhaps some of those hundreds who have been held there without charges were anti-American before and willing to do horrific crimes against us. But now… after being locked up for years with no charges and no trial… My guess is we’re doing a damned fine job of recruiting for the other side when we trample people’s rights.

We spy on our citizens, we suspend or ignore, the Fourth Amendment in ever widening circles of exceptions all in the name of National Security. Somehow we have, as a nation, decided that we are willing to give up a little liberty for a little security over and over again. We continue to give up our liberties with no real prove we have gained any security at all. Benjamin Franklin would be appalled. Our forefathers would be appalled. Yes. There is a risk involved in freedom. I would, like Thomas Jefferson, “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” Absolute peace and security is China’s goal as well. Do we want to model ourselves after their methods of achieving it?

Music’s job isn’t to “overflowing with urgency and significance” which probably explains the lackluster success of the albums released during that phase of Pearl Jam’s career. We need to get our head space out of the day we were attacked. We need to move our psyche forward. We can’t continue to live in the horrific images of jumpers and collapsing buildings. We as a people and a country didn’t die in those attacks. We should mourn those who did but we MUST go on living our lives and cannot let our lives be defined by the bad things that happen to us any more than any other victim of a violent crime can do that.

We’re a world super-power. As such we must focus on that. We must have goals, ideals, visions that are inspirational to others. We can’t live in that horrible morning 7 years ago. We’ll be nothing but a super-victim if we do. The American Dream wasn’t to be the biggest bully on the block or the most secure country or the country with the biggest walls or most metal detectors. We have GOT to focus on our future with an eye towards making the country a free country. There are no guarantees of safety in the Constitution. Safety is China’s goal… Freedom should be ours.

Yes. September 11, 2001 was a horrible day for our country because of the actions of foreign terrorists on our soil. So many more horrible days have passed since then though as we do to ourselves things that the terrorists could never accomplish, with a fleet of airplanes. Our losses of freedoms are our fault. They took lives. We’re surrendering our freedoms, our liberties, and the very ideals that made this country the greatest country in the world.

If you’ve never thought about giving twitter a look give it a glance. It’s easy to set up. It’s free, and it’s surprisingly addictive. For what is probably the best explanation of twitter I’ve ever seen check out this video on youtube.

I tried to embed the video in this post, but the youtube embed thing wasn’t playing nice. My guess is that twelve minutes after I go to bed it will post itself about 19 times over here on my blog and I’ll need to clean up the duplicates in the morning.

Best of luck to any of you in Ike’s way. He looks like he’s gonna beat Texas like he beat Tina after a hard drunk.

Alan Alda in Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

I wonder what the corollary would be for reading… Real reading is a willingness to let the book change you? It doesn’t scan as well. It’s probably got the wrong rhythm to it. In a tweet (A tweet is a post on the microblogging site twitter.) earlier this week I talked about three books that changed the way I think. I phrased it differently, but they’d be the most influential books I’ve read.

They are, in no particular order, Atlas Shrugged, Time Enough for Love, Starship Troopers, and Little Brother. The first three are classics. The last is a new one by Cory Doctorow that I think should be required reading in every 10th grade class. Maybe sooner. He’s giving the book away online so  that link up there is to a place you can download the book. I’m buying a copy though. It’s just that good. I read it originally on my Palm pilot, then listened to the audio book and want a hard copy made out of dead trees.

You may or may not have noticed (depending on how you read this) noticed some extra buttons/links on my sidebars. They’re motivated directly from Little Brother. One of the things that strikes me about the books I included in my brain-formatting list is that they all seem to be pretty independent making. The people in the books aren’t too terribly in love with authority. I think that’s funny since my biggest fear when I got promoted was that I’d become “the man” that I’d always rebelled against. I don’t think I have, but my guess is that “the man” never does think he is “the man.”

I’ve gotten very used to importing PDFs to their website that my boss sends me. (Everything he scans winds up a PDF and from there it goes to Evernote so it will be searchable later.) Between the two of us we’re really going paperless. It’s becoming very handy for tracking down open loops and is increasing both of our productivity.

Second meeting went exactly the same way and the best part for me was the lack of stress in between the meetings. I wasn’t shuffling papers into order, high-lighting, or making sure I could find whatever they might ask for at hand. I KNEW it was at hand because it was in Evernote as either a PDF or as a file I’d generated myself. And in any event I could get to it with a mouse click without waiting on some viewer to open or file to open.

Evernote really has become my one place repository for information.

This application is the first time I’ve wanted an iPhone. It’d allow me to use it all the time instead of just when I had my laptop out. But down that road lies madness! I still use my moleskine cahier for those times, and honestly, it’s probably the fastest, easiest, most streamlined method of capture while on the road and in the field.

I’m linking to two of the videos I could find. One on youtube, and another from WKRG in Mobile. Here’s to my Aunt Annie. *cheers*

Aunt Annie’s the one on the left. Notice in this picture, when compared with the videos how she still looks like her. Her hair’s a little whiter now than it was then. Aunt Annie and Granny came to visit us when we lived in Germany and in this picture they’re standing in front of a huge wine barrel brandishing two flagons of wine that they were quaffing! OK. More likely there’s two little glasses that they moistened their lips with the wine. I don’t remember them getting falling down drunk and chasing young Germans down the road.

When I got home I saw this on Almost Frugal and it made me laugh.

From Almost Frugal:
There is one frugal thing however, that if I had any real choice in the matter I would stop doing in a heartbeat.
Hanging the laundry. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If I could fit a dryer into my house, I would buy in a heartbeat, extra cost and environmental impact be damned.

I think it’s funny how things that make some people happy, that some people enjoy doing can be on other people’s short list of things they’d rather never do again. Me. I love retail. I like managing in retail. There are others who find, after getting into it that they’d rather starve than deal with the public in any capacity at all. I get that… heck, after a really long day of it sometimes I feel that way too. But it goes away. And maybe if I didn’t GET to dry my clothes on the line, but HAD to… maybe I’d feel the same way about it as Kelly over on Almost Frugal. For now though, I’ll enjoy it.

PS: Crap - just realized I uploaded full sized image and only modified size tags. Apologies to dialupers.

Now, if only it can be set per post. I know. I don’t ask a lot do I?

Hire “engage-able” team members. One HR leader we interviewed underscored this point: “Our number one problem was lack of fit. We needed to hire people who could be successful. Instead of training square pegs to fit the round hole, we now try to hire round pegs.”

I recently went to work at a store where the staff just seemed to lack enthusiasm and zest for… well, anything. I talked to customers about the change in the store’s atmosphere and asked them if they could describe it for me. I was fishing. I did the whole, "I can’t put my finger on it but…" and let them fill in the blanks.

One of the regulars, used to be a regular, now an irregular, said "The old manager hired employees who were a pleasure to visit with and talk to. Even the ones who couldn’t count change were fun to talk to." He admitted every employee wasn’t perfect or even always the most competent but they were always sociable and friendly and that made up for it to an extent. Now bad service was accompanied by boring lackluster employees. There was no reason to come to the place and it was a craps shoot on who’d be behind the counter. Good service but no personality or bad service with no personality.

I recently had a manager tell me they needed more of a form they used for interviews and they didn’t know the questions by heart, they just always answered the questions, filled out the form and that was what their previous supervisor had them do. I was appalled. "Here’s the thing," says I, "the biggest part of an interview for me is to know at the end of the interview if you can stand to talk to the person for another two minutes." If you can’t wait for the interview to end I don’t care how qualified they are do NOT hire them." We’re in sales. We deal with the public every minute we’re open and it has to be something the potential employee is interested in doing.

If an employee being interviewed for a sales position isn’t enthusiastically trying to sell themselves to the interviewer why in the world would anybody believe they’ll try and sell anything in the future? Great sales people are great relationship builders. Even if the relationship lasts 2 minutes for that time they’re making the customer feel great for that two minutes. If they’re not engaged during the interview. If they’re not making the interviewer feel great during the interview, and really selling themselves enthusiastically they’re not going to cut the mustard. A technically great applicant who doesn’t sell it, doesn’t