🚀 go-pugleaf

soundy@nextlevel.com (Matt Ion) wrote:

>Most of the stories I have about FS amount to nothing more than employee
>stupidity and ignorance; certainly, I can't chalk any of them up to an
>outright attempt to screw me over.  Hiring criteria seems to place a far
>higher emphasis on salesmanship than on general product knowledge

I would tend to differ, Matt.
I think that stupidity is the prime selection factor in FS hiring
practices.  I have certainly not seen any salesmanship from their
staff.  As a matter of fact, not even as much as common courtesy.

In fact, a friend of mine who has a rather solid sales record in large
electronics stores was rejected by FS. He was too well qualified.  So
he went back to Ontario where is is now an area manager for another
electronics store, after less than 2 years with the company.

>My guess is, he was snubbed by a rude salesdroid with
>someone else's fatter wallet in his sights, and took it upon himself to
>go after burying the entire chain.

I would not claim that I have visited every one of their stores, but
in the 4 or 5 stores in the Vancouver area that I did visit, the
rudeness and ignorance of FS floor staff was practically uniform.

>Case in point: his big
>Internet Direct tirade last year, in which he spent several months and
>many megabytes of bandwidth deriding them and encouraging others to go
>elsewhere, while continuing to post from his @direct.ca account...

Touche.

The beauty of _that_ story is that Direct is still at it.  Still
chopping customers without any particular reason and without as much
as a note to the user "BTW, we've canned you don't bother calling
back". 

Just this past weekend another friend of mine was told by IDirest
techies that his configuration got corrupted, so he re-installed
Win95, TWICE, reinstalled all the software he uses for access, spent 4
hours, dicking around with his machine, till on the 5th call to Direct
support, one of the techies had this bright idea of checking the guy's
account.  Lo and behold, there was a hold on it.

The reason?  Some bozo from another country didn't like what my buddy
posted in some newsgroup and sent in a complaint.  So Friday 5pm
before a long weekend (sounds familiar?) IDirect simply pulled the
plug on him and the girl that did it went home to enjoy her long
weekend.

Needless to say, by next week, my friend is going to be a "former"
IDirect user.

I guess, some folks learn quicker than others.   :-)

Karl Pollak
Richmond, British Columbia
Visit  http://www.frasevalley.com/routes