My First Day

Started my job at Best Buy last night as a computer sales person. I have had a couple different styles of training for the handful of jobs I have held, and what I experienced with this job would be the loosest definition of training out there.

I arrive and am pointed to the back to "find someone working in the computer area", not a name, just any random person working back there. I am expecting them to know they have a trainee coming in, they had no clue. I am expecting to have some kind of binder to read through with training material, no binder. I am expecting to get a tour of the store, no tour. I am expecting at the very least a run down of the "extras" they try to sell (protection plans, etc), nothing. So basically I am shown how to clock in, which is important and then I am handed off to one of the sales people who shows me around my area (which I already basically knew from shopping in the store) and then we go to help a customer. I am standing there observing (assuming that is what I am supposed to be doing) , when another customer approaches me and I have no choice but to help them.

I am thrust into my first sale after watching my co-worker for maybe 10 minutes (this is about 30 minutes into my shift), so I sell a laptop and ALL the extras to my first customer and I had no clue what the hell I was doing, even got a pricey bag to go with it. So this sale apparently means I don't need further training (and might I remind you that I literally can't even use a register because I wasn't trained let alone given a login). I continue to sell about 7 or more computers with over half of them having the pricey protection plans and another 1 or 2 with all the extras. I would guess it was about as good as anyone could have done on their first day with no real training.

I just took what I know about computers (a fair amount) and spliced it with the kind of sales person I like to have when I purchase something and even some of that casino skill of reading people and boom! The easy part is that most people don't really understand computers and that is where having that knowledge and sounding like you know what you are talking about really comes in handy, assurance is really what these people are looking for.