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***official*** annual retail employees complain about black friday thread

rudeguy

rudeguy

Lifer
Well I have to be up for work in 7 hours. By the time I get there there should be right around 100 people in line, 500 by the time we open. We have a plan to go hand out coffee and tickets for our limited quanity items. Our big goal is to keep the number of physical fights to 1 or less.


This thread will be updated throughout the day tomorrow, time permitting.
 
Originally posted by: GoodDad
Well I have to be up for work in 7 hours. By the time I get there there should be right around 100 people in line, 500 by the time we open. We have a plan to go hand out coffee and tickets for our limited quanity items. Our big goal is to keep the number of physical fights to 1 or less.


This thread will be updated throughout the day tomorrow, time permitting.
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please capture the chaos on video then post it. I want to see some fights over the products with the best deal :thumbsup:😀.
 
We can let the cat out of the bag now that its pretty much black friday.

I work for ABC Warehouse here in Michigan. We are the whores of the electronics stores around here. Tomorrow we will have free dvd players,$37 tv's, $17 microwaves, even a good AMD computer for $199.

I am one of the managers so I will get to deal with the chaos. Right now my plan is to have at least half a fifth in me by the time we open. Anyone have any better ideas?
 
I feel for you man.... a manager on a day like that... all those cranky retail customers...... I used to be in retail management (Home Depot).... Loved the business, hated the annoying idiotioc morons who would ruin your whole day
 
This is the first time in 11 years that I don't have to work on BF. There are some good things to be said about corporate restructuring. 🙂
 
Well I survived BF. I work at Wally-World, 4:30am-1pm. I handed out the vouchers for the 27" TV and 20" TV /DVD player combo. Pretty tame day. The only excitement was some lady punched out another lady over a Gameboy, and some customer was taking fishing line and tying it to stackbases and shelves, I heard 4 or 5 reports of people tripping over fishing line. No eyewitness accounts from me though.

I don't know how all your stores did, but when I left, we were WAY below expectations. It was about half as busy as I expected... probably because there weren;t a whole lot of great deals. Target did GREAT from what I understand.
 
Ah, I work at Staples as one of the electronic experts there. I worked a 5:30am - 1:30pm shift this morning and it was actually really quiet when I came to the store. There was only 1 guy waiting but more and more people showed up around 6am right before we opened our doors. Even then, it was very melodramatic as I expected hordes of people to push each other and long lines. That wasn't the case as the lines were short (for BF standards anyway) and there weren't any physical fights.

There were only a few bad customers. One lady brought in a Walmart ad saying they were advertising a Hewlett Packard computer for $450 or something but the ad didn't list what model it was. Our store had an HP that was $889 (the spces look pretty good actually) but obviously it wasn't the same model. The old lady moaned and complained for 30 minutes and finally left the store.

There was another guy who purchased a $40 chair that normally goes for $130. He got his chair but when he came home and opened the box, a crucial part was missing. By the time he came back into the store, all the chairs were gone so he couldn't do an exchange or anything. He was pretty pissed off but he was too thick headed to realize that we weren't trying to shaft him but rather, we were just out of physical chairs. He even said that one of our sweet cashiers "woofed" at him.

It seems like the 6am people all came in the store looking for the 256mb PNY Attache Memory Drive that we carried. That ran out around 7am. Too bad we didn't carry more of that (our store had 25 to begin the day with). The silly Staples 615 joules 6 outlet adapter went really fast which surprised all of us. The 160gb Maxtor Hard Drives for $75 - $35 rebate didn't go as fast as I had expected. After rebates, its rougly a quarter per gig - can't beat that! The Netgear 54g networking bundle (router + pcmcia) went pretty quickly but not as quickly as I had expected either. What shocked me was the AT&T 900mhz cordless phone. That went almost as fast as the PNY Attache.

When I had left the store around 1:30pm, we still had a couple of Early Bird specials left in stock. We had a crapload of the Linksys 10/100 NIC left. We still had 5 of the Proview 17" LCDs (we started the day with about two dozen). The Proviews don't seem that bad (it has a response time of 16ms).

All in all, it was my first Black Friday experience and I feel damn lucky. It was a relief to have a good sized crowd come in because it brought business but at the same time, it didn't bring chaos.
 
Well I just got home. Worked from 7am toil 9:45pm.

Today went over really smoothly. The only real excitement was when we opened the doors. There was the usual hundreds of people waiting in line and some lady tried to bust in front of the line right when we opened up. She made it through first, but got shoved aside and trampled by the mod. We just laughed.

We did something like 500% of our normal business today and no one I talked to waited in line for more than a half hour. Pretty good if you ask me.

Funny story of the day: I was ringing up everyone at our register, and had probably 50 people in my line. Some guy actually had the nerve to ask me for a deal on a $47 DVD/VCR combo. I looked at him and laughed. He says "but it says or less!" (thats our famous price guarentee, we put or less next to all our prices so people know we will beat anyone's deal) I quickly explained that to him and he started making a fuss. I just stepped back and asked him if he was really going to make the fifty people in line behind him wait longer so he could haggle over a couple bucks. He said yeah. I told him to either buy it or leave. Everyone in line just laughed at him.
 
I worked at wallyworld the night before and I had the day off today to go shopping. I had to get pallets ready last night and wrap them in black plastic. On a value board game deal the manufacturer forgot to cross off a upc so I had to cross them all off with a marker, what a pain. I heard sales where no where near what they wanted them at but it's their own fault as they did not really have that great of deals.
 
Props to all of you who worked today. I only went to Staples, and got just about everything I was sent to get (save the Linksys card, but I put it on order - thanks Staples employee!)

I felt bad about the hassle the employees were getting, so I asked the manager for a comment card and filled out some positive comments. I thought they did a really good job - there was always somebody available to help when I asked for it, and the employees all stayed very cheerful when Staples.com was running like a slug and customers were scowling at them.
 
I just have a complaint about the BF retail stores. Why didn't they have express check out lines? I had less than 10 small items and I had to wait over 30 minutes just to check out. If they have express line for 10 items or less, that would be great.

BTW, I didn't get any drinks from waiting outside in the cold this morning, LOL.
 
Originally posted by: Svnla
I just have a complaint about the BF retail stores. Why didn't they have express check out lines? I had less than 10 small items and I had to wait over 30 minutes just to check out. If they have express line for 10 items or less, that would be great.

BTW, I didn't get any drinks from waiting outside in the cold this morning, LOL.
Click to expand...

I really hope my sarcasm meter is broken.

How about this? Lets make a special line just for you at any store you go to. That way you will never have to wait in line.

30 minutes is nothing for BF. Go to worst buy and wait in line next year. Then you will thank those of us that can give you a 30 minute wait.

We have to deal with thousands of customers on BF. We have to take all customers as they come. I run the car audio department at my store. I only HAD to ring up car audio stuff, but I rang up anything that anyone had. We do what we can with the limited number of computers and people that we have on hand. Let me take a wild guess and say that you are the kind that would complain about winning the lottery because you only got to take home half of what you won?
 
Here's for the whiners.

I worked BF a couple years ago at Toys R' Us and I loved it. Sure, it's not the busiest place, I spent 30 minutes trying to get to one side of the store to show someone and item, then immediately someone would grab my attention again. fastest 10 hour shift ever.

Add in the fact that the store had food for the employees all day (something new every 2 hours, subs, pizza, wings, cookies...) Then ALSO factor in that for every hour you worked, you got your name to put into a drawing to win tons of various things. I walked away with a Dreamcast Sports System, a $50 GC and some other random swag.

I would do it every year if I could. It's the only justifiable part of making $6/hr there. 😛
 
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