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Originally Posted by Darth Cylon
Then I went on to work for FS/BB both in store and in their CHQ. It's a slave labour camp there. If you are part-timer in store you are paid minimum wage and not guaranteed any hours. One week they schedule you to work 30 hours, the next week only 4 hours. You are only getting your shift 1 week ahead and their can change your shift without telling you.
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I'll throw in my insight as well as I also spent some time employed with FS in the past. The comment about being a "labour camp" and how part-timers got inconsistent hours week to week sometimes, while not false, had a reasoning behind it. Both FS and BB employed a lot high school kids and college kids in their late/early 20's to fill the evening shifts as full timers were needed to cover the mornings and afternoons. As someone who used to build department schedules, there was a lot of challenge in getting part-timers to have consistent hours due to conflicts with school hours, balancing the staffing matrix (ie. having too many people on the weekend and not enough mid-week), and when some of these kids just stick around for the term or just one year, you get a lot of turnover and the full timers fight and squabble for having the consistency of their own hours changed to accommodate balancing of the schedule.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Darth Cylon
Hell my last manager even took my idea and presented it to the director as if it was her own idea.
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Interesting you brought that up. Who do you think came up the Geek Squad initiative? Back in 2000 or 01, myself and a few other IPG guys were offering in-home set up to our customers we closed sales with as our own personal touch to our service way before Worst Buy ever came to Canada; this was a matter of building rapport with our client base. A year or 2 down the road after the take over, word got around to the regional manager at the time about we were doing who pitched it as his own idea to the VP or whoever because they thought it would be a great opportunity to cash in on the service. But of course, marketing it as a corporate service took away from that personal touch we were able to provide for our clients. It pissed us off having some of the rapport we could offer to be taken away like that, but also that none of us were given any sort of credit or compensation for its inception.
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Originally Posted by Darth Cylon
Everyone I know who left FS/BB - by choice or not - is a much happier and better man.
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^^ Truth. I walked away at the height of my prime in that I was a COE Elite every year for 3 years and could've chosen to run my tenure longer as I was still fully capable of keeping up my metrics, but ever since the Worst Buy takeover, the corporate culture has gradually continued on a downward spiral. When FS had its original Canadian roots, there was a very healthy and fun sense of family and I enjoyed coming in to work. Those feelings deteriorated over time with the integration of BB's policies and procedures, the disrespectful nature in how they handled disciplinary actions, etc. It all came to a boil for me in 2008 as even though I could still perform as a COE Elite, I just wasn't enjoying the job anymore. I wasn't the only one that felt this way as myself along with 2 other IPG Elites from the same store departed within 6 months. Then another few months went by and even Kevin Layden himself resigned as president. You gotta know SOMETHING must be wrong when the captain jumps ship too, right?
Laffy, your post doesn't make it seem as though you've been there for very long as you seem quite comfortable with FS being scrubbed out of the market, and as a full-timer who seems to be confident in his job security, I'm happy for you. But you'll never truly know how much better it was to work for FS before the buyout.
At the end of the day, as sudden as it seems to be for the general public, I knew this day would come eventually as did everyone else I know who used to work there. The weak electronics market was the last nail in the coffin was all. RIP.
Sadly, there still aren't really many other alternatives for mid to high quality electronics as a retailer in Canada, so BB will probably still end up getting some of my money still. Not for computers, but for home theatre, what other avenue do we have in this country besides Visions?
