It's a strange circumstance, but sometimes the very people retail employees are there to help are the ones causing the most strife. Whether it's ignorance on the part of the customer or a lack of skills on the part of the salesperson, sometimes the simplest of things become a major issue.
Take commission for example.
I have never been a fan of paying people a commission as a means of encouraging good customer service. It's just one of those things that's good in theory but in execution never seems to pan out right. Commission just seems to always bring out the worst in people. For a time, I worked in a retail store that only paid on commission. That's right. Employees did not get an hourly wage. Instead they got a percentage of an item's profit as a commission. As long as an employee made a minimum amount of commission equal to minimum wage, he or she would get to keep his or her job. Seems like a great idea to create incentive for sales people to sell more items, right?
Wrong.
All it did was split people into two different camps: those who would do absolutely anything to make a buck even if it would be detrimental to a coworker; and those whose morals prevented them from being shady and thus ended up not getting paid. Now, I'm fairly certain it's obvious where I fell on the spectrum. However, I did have bills to pay and mouths to feed, so I was always running around asking people if they needed help with something.
Enter the customer.
I was actually helping another customer when a couple came up and asked for my help with choosing a vacuum cleaner. I finished with my current customer and then went to help the couple. We spent nearly an hour going over the different models, dumping dirt on our test carpet and using the sample displays to see how things worked. By the end of it, I'd explained the differences between models, filters, what HEPA was for and what it meant, and which would work best for their home situation. After nearly fifty minutes of conversation, we narrowed down their choices from fifteen different candidates to two. Both of these were fairly lucrative for me, and so I was looking at maybe getting an actual paycheck that week. Not bad for an hour of work. So I asked which of the two they had decided on. And they told me.
They were going to wait.
I am sure you can imagine the soul-crushing despair I felt at that point. If I had sold either of the two models they were waffling between I would have managed to make between $65 and $80. Considering I was lucky to make that much helping dozens of people in the day, that would have been an awesome turn-around for an hour of work. Instead I was stuck there, watching as they casually wandered off discussing a movie they were looking to buy instead, having just spent an hour of my life I couldn't get back wasting my time trying to make a sale.
I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and moved on. I spent the rest of my shift as I usually did, scrambling to try and make up enough to count as a minimum wage employee so that I wouldn't get fired. Considering minimum wage at the time was $8 an hour, that meant I had to come up with $320 in commission every week or else risk termination. Most items paid $10 or less in commission, and it wasn't a very busy time of year. I could do it, but it meant harassing every single person I came across to let me help them, when half the other employees were doing the same thing. Still, I moved on.
I then discovered later that the couple came back, got the more profitable of the two vacuums, and let one of the vultures ring them up. At no point did they mention that I had helped them, or that I had spent nearly an hour with them that day. Nor did the vulture bother to mention it to me. I found out when I came back from lunch and saw them leaving with the vacuum.
When I mentioned it, the vulture merely shrugged and said I should have written them up then and let them wander around the store with the ticket until they were ready to check out. That way I could have gotten paid. As it was, "You snooze, you lose, babe. Your loss is my gain."
Yes, I wanted to punch him.
No, I didn't actually do it. It was a close thing, though.
For those who don't understand what's wrong with this scenario, there's not much I can do to help you. It was perfectly feasible for the commission to have been transferred to the person who did the actual work. Meaning me. Unfortunately, in order to do so, I would have needed the vulture to sign a form saying yes, I did deserve the commission instead of him. Insert eye-roll here. Someone like that would never agree to give back money he thinks he earned fair and square off another person's hard work. Particularly when it's that much. I could have gone to my manager at the time and protested, but I knew it would accomplish nothing. Without the vulture agreeing nothing would be done, and the more I pressed the more likely he was to steal sales out from under me again.
I can't help but think that if employees were paid an hourly wage instead of a commission, things like this wouldn't happen.