Somehow working at Best Buy was way worse than any fast food job I ever took. I nail the interviews with the general manager who is apparently ecstatic to have me aboard. The careers website said that the position wasn't seasonal, but I was hired in September, so I ask him if the position is seasonal and he says no, it is permanent. I was thrown into a training room with a computer not set up to go to the training website so I had to find it myself. My trainer lost the login the company had set up for me so I had to call HR on my personal phone because the managers couldn't let me use theirs as a security risk and I couldn't just stand on the sales floor using a landline at the registers. Upon doing this, a manager spots me and yells at me for using my personal phone.
I'm given no login to the registers for the first three weeks. Two and a half weeks in the general manager calls me into their office and tells me that I need to make some kind of sale or they're going to fire me. I tell them I haven't been given a login yet and they respond with surprise. They investigate and it turns out that the employee I was shadowing was supposed to give me my register login but never did so that he could claim all the sales on his account instead. He receives no reprimand for this.
A short while later I still have not received any training whatsoever on sales and they have not even told me what Geek Squad Protection, or GSP, even was, but I was told that it needs to make up a certain percentage of the revenue I generate for the store. I ask every single customer if they'd like to sign up for it, some say yes, most say no. A manager calls me into the office and tells me my GSP shares have been abysmal and I need to start pushing it. I ask him what some decent techniques to sell GSP are and he says that's "not my fucking problem" and to go ask my trainer. My trainer quit two weeks ago. Upon telling him this, he shrugs and leaves.
At the end of my shift that day the same manager yells out my name and beckons me over with his finger like a proper douchebag. He logs into some sales thing on the register and looks at our statistics and we have the following conversation.
"...you had the highest GSP of any associate in the store today."
"I guess so, sir."
"What did you do? What did you change?"
"Nothing, sir."
"...Well, I don't know what I expected." He leaves.
The time is now the end of November. After a hectic Black Friday I check my schedule and see I have zero hours for the next two weeks. I wait through those two weeks - I was still in college so it's not like I wasn't busy - and I have to physically go to the store to check my schedule because my managers never set up a MyTLC account for me to use at home. I have zero hours. This repeats until the middle of January. Aside from Black Friday itself, I was still an employee of the store, but was being given zero hours. Mid January, the general manager calls my personal phone and asks me to come into the store to talk to him. I assume I'm being let go. I come in and wait an hour and a half next to the manager's office. The GM comes out for something else and sees me sitting there, and it's obvious he's forgotten I was supposed to be there. He tells me the store is too busy today and I should come back tomorrow. I come back the next day, wait another hour to meet with the GM, upon which he tells me my seasonal employment is over, but they're having a job fair in March if I'd like to re-apply for a permanent position.
I give him the most polite "we'll see!" I can through gritted teeth and head home, where I immediately applied to Chipotle where I eventually became a manager until I finished my degree.
