store's employees asking if you need help

I hate it whenever I'm approached in any store by an employee to ask if I needed help. I take it as an insult. If I needed someone's help I'd go find them. Being asked if I need help looking at DVD's makes me feel like the employee believes I can't read the labels or something.

I also pretty much broke every rule in the book when I was working retail as well when it comes to that stuff.

Instead of asking them if they needed help I'd just give them a basic greeting - hey; hello; how ya doin'?, something along those lines. I don't have a problem with employees at other stores doing that - it makes them seem less like corporate robots and more human, not to mention it serves the same purpose as directly asking if they need help - if they needed help they always asked afterwards. If not, they'd simply respond to my greeting and I'd walk off.

Our policy was also to say hello to every person that walks through the door. I rarely gave them the "welcome to Books A Million" shit. Usually it was just a nod and it worked just as well. Less effort on my part, achieves the desired result, doesn't sound cheesy, and doesn't make the customer wish I could go away.

I was once approached by a manager who said I don't exactly follow guidelines when it comes to communicating with the customers. I responded by saying it must work somehow since I sell more of their discount/club membership cards than all the other employees combined, and that takes place by selling them at registers (I didn't do the required shitty corporate sales pitch either). She never questioned me after that.
 
It bothers people like us, but as someone who works at a GameStop, you'd be really surprised as to how often an older customer (like a parent) is about ready to walk out the door and you ask them if they needed any help and they end up buying $100+ worth of merchandise.
 
After working retail for several months it, more often than not, becomes really easy to see which customers need help and which ones don't. Then again, it takes a bit of work since I tend to gauge when most customers enter the store, how long they are taking, if they have picked anything up yet, if they seem to be wandering around aimlessly...it all depends. The people who could use a bit of extra help or assistance in finding things aren't too hard to spot, but there are also those people you can tell would sooner stick their head in a McD's fryer than accept any other help. ;)

The problem is is that some people just don't want help while others desperately need it but they don't have the time to search for an employee and then look for what they need. I know I gained my store about three dozen customers just because they were shocked that someone would take time out of stocking, cleaning, or whatever else I was doing just to help them find a random gift. It's a bit unsettling when you can gain loyal customers just by being nice, as if customer service died off years ago. On the other hand, I "lost" five customers by offering help during the holiday rush (how dare I point them to the right section when their gift is already two days late!) but they turned back into the store several weeks later without a care in the world, much less any animosity towards me for trying to help.

We take the good with the bad. Just because we ask if you need help has nothing to do with your shopping abilities, sometimes we're just trying to make things easier and faster. That and, for some of us, we can tell you exactly where a product is going to be, which is a bit scary when your store has over 50,000 individual items. ;)
 
[quote name='allyourblood']with all due respect, i wonder if age is a factor. i have a hunch it's mostly younger CAGs who are bothered by the employees. i'm shooting for the hovering-around-18-years-old crowd.

i just really don't mind being asked stuff, even if it's everytime i visit a store. i can take a couple seconds and turn them down while i shop.[/quote]

Well i am 25, I guess thats younger in a way... LOL
 
I don't see why it's so much of a bother to you. At least they are trying to help instead of ignore you.

How about instead we say "Hi sir, can I give you a cock-punch?" and regardless of the answer, we punch you in the cock.

That would make my days at work a lot more satisfying.
 
[quote name='Don Wuebos']
And i must say that i disagree with the age demographic for those who are asked questions, because at my store it seems to be the older people who are asked about what kind of games they are looking for just because i think that they are seen as a bigger prospective for a purchase, even though that's probably not even the first bit true....
Oh statistics, how you ruin the world.[/quote]

when i mentioned age, i wasn't saying that young people get asked more often. i was just stating that perhaps it bothers younger folks more than older people.
 
[quote name='captainfrizo']I hate it whenever I'm approached in any store by an employee to ask if I needed help. I take it as an insult. If I needed someone's help I'd go find them. Being asked if I need help looking at DVD's makes me feel like the employee believes I can't read the labels or something.

I also pretty much broke every rule in the book when I was working retail as well when it comes to that stuff.[/quote]

years of research and surveys have brought us to where we are in retail, in regards to customer service. it's not an experiment that some places are trying, when they ask someone if they need help on sight. it comes from years of asking customers what they want from a store. the majority of consumers are getting exactly what they ask for.

from my several years working in retail (the majority of that in management), i noticed that very few people dislike being greeted and offered help. that slim percentage is just gonna have to cope with someone trying to be courteous to them, since they don't represent the average shopper.
 
Worst store ever for employees approaching you and asking if you need help is Radio Shack. Which is why I will never again in my life step into one of those stores.

GameStop/EB employees are not as bad, but they do ask you if you need help way too much and they pressure you to purchase or preorder pointless things. I now only visit these stores if I really need to. I make sure to get in and get out as quickly as possible.

I also hate Best Buy (1) because of the door greeting and (2) because employees will ask you if you need help just for the sake of asking it. If you really do need help, they have no idea what to do and are rarely helpful.
 
[quote name='klwillis45']BB was the first store that popped in my head.[/QUOTE]

of course i always make them go to the back room and look for that copy of katamair damacy or metal slug gba or whatnot that their store locator says is in stock. or if you are looking for something, they can check the computer for you and see if it is indeed in stock(still takling about BB). I actually like best buy for their weekly ads, and their clearances and their occasional super coupons($10 off $30 anyone)?
 
[quote name='wubb']Like they ask you where they yarn is? Damn some people be so ignorant.[/QUOTE]

lol. riiiiiight. simple questions like that are easy. but it's some of the more obscure items in the store that catch me off guard, and then the customer starts going off on a little rant. "i thought you should know where that is..." anyways, i guess u have to work in retail to understand.
 
[quote name='mentos888']lol. riiiiiight. simple questions like that are easy. but it's some of the more obscure items in the store that catch me off guard, and then the customer starts going off on a little rant. "i thought you should know where that is..." anyways, i guess u have to work in retail to understand.[/quote]

don't you know where almost everything in your store is, seriously? when i worked at TRU, we had thousands of SKUs, and i could pretty much direct you to anything in the store exactly. if you've been working somewhere at least a couple months, you ought to know where just about everything is. that's not at all as hard as you might think. heck, at least if you know the general area of where something is stocked, you can lead the customer there and look for it together.
 
^ I don't think learning the layout of a Michaels is quite as easy as learning the layout of a Best Buy.

I mean there are so many obscure and random items at Michaels.
 
[quote name='allyourblood']don't you know where almost everything in your store is, seriously? when i worked at TRU, we had thousands of SKUs, and i could pretty much direct you to anything in the store exactly. if you've been working somewhere at least a couple months, you ought to know where just about everything is. that's not at all as hard as you might think. heck, at least if you know the general area of where something is stocked, you can lead the customer there and look for it together.[/quote]
Not neccesarily. Back when I worked at Walmart, I was the freezer stocker and that was it. I wasn't allowed to go to other sections. Oddly enough, I'd be up to my elbows in a pile of frozen vegetables with a cart full of TV dinners next to me and I'd get people asking me where motor oil was. I'd tell them probably automotive on the other side of the store, but I couldn't say for sure as I was relegated to the freezers. And then they'd stare at me blankly and I'd have to push them across the store and put it in their hand anyways after 10 minutes of searching myself.

My least favorite customers were the people that would walk down the bread isle while shouting into their cell phone and proceed to ask me where the bread was, oblivious to the wall of wheat they'd been walking along for 20 meters. This happened once a day at least.

[quote name='Legolas813']Worst store ever for employees approaching you and asking if you need help is Radio Shack. Which is why I will never again in my life step into one of those stores.
[/quote]
QFT :rofl: I went into the local 'Shack and bolted strait for the capacitors in the back as I knew what I wanted and where it was. The counter jocky follows me and vacantly asks me if he can help me find anything. I tell him I'm looking for capacitors (as I am, infact, looking AT them) and he tells me, "Yeah... I really couldn't help you there... I don't even know where they are." :whistle2:s

He then proceeds to stand behind me and stares as if I'm disecting an alien. After a couple of minutes he asks me if I found what I'm looking for and I tell him I found capacitors with the right farad rating, but the voltage was too high. (You could smell the smoke from his mind being blown) He then says verbatim "yea... you might wanna check an electronics place er somethin... I can't remember the name, you might wanna google it. Its some electronics place."

It was at this point I started nodding and smiling while backing slowly to the door.
 
everyone's really cool where i work, but even employee's who've been here for more than a year don't know where a couple things are. i guess i can probably attribute that to all the seasonal stuff we get in all the time. plus, the fact that a lot of departments get moved around all the time and hardly stay in the same place sometimes. sometimes they're on shelves and sometimes they're in the "drive aisles" where customers walk. it's so weird...we have 1 x-mas aisle right now on one side of the store and a bigger x-mas aisle on the other side.
 
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