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I don't know about other stores but pay for service in store#27 sucks big time. It's not funny anymore when you get paid the almost the same as a "accessory sales associate" on the floor. They been screwing us over since the commission thing went through. I just want to vent out my frustrations. This stupid company is taking money off my family's table and pocketing it for the profit of their upper management people.
Is there anybody out there that works for service department and feels the same way?
This bull crap has got to be changed. Oh yeah and for the people that think service is an awesome place to work, Its really not. You get shouted at by angry customers. You get shouted at by management when you need help resolving customer issues. And did I mention that you get paid 400 - 450 dollars doing this. On top off that they want you to work on warranty and non-warranty computers and be A+ certified for it. -
If you're skilled enough, there are consulting firms and such that you could work for, have a better opportunity at higher pay, and also get better training.
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Hm.. I've actually been thinking of going to the service dept from AV sales.. there's too much shit going on in sales and I'd rather have something more stable.
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You work for base hourly of 7.5 or minimum wage (what ever state you are located at) and then commission on sold service on the counter. Oh yeah check this out. If you go over the allocated money for psc replacements they actually take the money out of your GP. They basically take the money you earned on the counter to use to replace a customers unit or to repair the customers unit. In other words they take the commission you just made and use that to purchae the repairs and cost for replacement.
I've been trying to get out of this bullshit company but , right now job are hard to find in vegas. I think they are taking advantage of the situation the economy is in so they can make more money for themselves and pay less to the workers. Believe me, I'm looking for other places to work at. -
I have to vent about service. First of all, you thought the POS system was bad, the service department has to deal with like 5 different computer systems, none of which communicate between each other. I'm pretty fast at checking customers in for service and it takes me about 20 minutes if I'm only checking them in for something simple. If a customer asks for a loaner or if there's a line... HOLY HELL, you're looking at 45 minutes to an hour from the time they walk in to the time they leave, sometimes even longer. I usually tell the customer to hang out in the cafe and I'll get them when it's time for them to sign their papers.
The worst part is that nothing is intuitive. The procedure to do each thing is always completely different than it was to do the last thing. Nothing is streamlined, nothing is efficient, and you're constantly distracted with customers coming to the counter asking you why their internet isn't working or if you can show them where "X" is. In my last job, I could get about 9 computers repaired a day. With all the distractions and inefficiency at Fry's, I'm lucky if I can get 2 completed each day. I mean I love the people in my department, they're all great guys, but we all know this place fucking SUCKS and most are trying to get jobs with Apple or elsewhere but are working here until they do.
There are so many things about the service department that I wish I could change. It's so inefficient and yet sometimes I wonder if the company likes it like that to discourage people from seeking service on their unit. -
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CommentAuthorfrys_morman
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2010
@CornBerry: I was making almost the same pay working in returns. IN FUCKING RETURNS. Returns is an almost mindless job compared to service. The store I work at to my knowledge pulls some of the best numbers in our district, and yeah we make 400-450, 450 if we are lucky. Plus they screwed up our PSC allocation because apparently its calculated by taking an average from the last 5 years, but we've only been open since 07, and PSC work was slow until 08. So we go over by a few thousand dollars on a slow week...
@gobo760: I completely agree. The distractions are absurd. Trying to replace a motherboard in a laptop? So much as touch it and the phone rings or a customer comes to the counter asking for the "local tech guru" or the "smartest geek in the house" or the "I need an expert on sata drives" with a clever smirk on their face. I don't want to sound like I dislike customers, but our job is to be constantly interrupted.
The Home Install system is pure garbage, I don't know who they paid to write that but its pure shit. I could pay a freshman in computer science at a junior college to write better software then that.
All of our techs are great people, but the way the dept works everyone is always on edge -
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Mga putang ina na mga hinayupak na yan may araw din sila.
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xyvermax: Mga putang ina na mga hinayupak na yan may araw din sila.
No shit. And thats on a good day. -
stop speaking filipino
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I'm sorry master D.
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CommentAuthorGuest 32470
- CommentTimeJun 27th 2010
I used to be the I.S. Technician at one of the higher volume stores for about 3.5 yrs. I always tell people I work with now or have conversations about Fry's. I wouldn't wish my worst enemies to work at Fry's, especially in the service department. It's absolutely insane the number of distractions you have through out the day. You are yelled at by management and customers equally about getting repairs done. Yet, you have to stop and answer the phone, deal with sales associates bringing customers to the counter to answer stupid questions they should be able to answer themselves. You have to deal with all the bullshit that the main service center screws up. On top of that being right next to the SM/ASM office you always have to stop what you're doing and take care of whatever issues they don't want to deal with.
All this and more while trying to catch error messages during troubleshooting or reassembling some assholes laptop who insists on sitting at the counter and watching you the entire time.
What Fry's has needed since the beginning is a closed off service department. They needed to close off the section where techs are hidden doing the repairs and hire monkeys to just work the counters and answer the phones. They also needed to let the damn technicians have stools to sit on for gods sake! Letting us not have to wear a freaking shirt and tie would be a bonus. Is it really necessary to ruin so many good cloths when you're having to work on some of the most disgusting, smoke covered and bug infested computers? -
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I feel ya. While we're on this topic, why are the PSC agreements we sell such crap? Yesterday I had to call a customer and tell them that the broken hinge on their laptop wasn't covered by the PSC agreement and home office rejected their claim (the hinge was obviously defective as I've seen about 4 of this same model of HP laptop with this same broken hinge, but apparently that doesn't matter to home office if the customer was able to physically touch it before it broke).
I mean unless the customer has no physical contact with the part in question, it's not covered. My only gripe with that policy is it inevitably sets the customer up for a confrontation with the service techs. Most of the techs at my store all have stress balls that they use between customers since the customers always want to pick a fight when they realize their warranties/PSC's wont cover 90% of the stuff that typically goes wrong with their machines. Two employees in particular in my department always start twitching nervously and you can see the veins get big on their foreheads when the customer starts in with the "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!" rant. I mean if Fry's wants to sell the customer a bag a magic beans, that's fine. But why do we have to be the ones to notify the customers of this fact? Have the fucking sales reps who told them "it covers everything babe, *wink wink* don't worry about it
" be the ones to tell them.
And if that's out of the question, at least get some untrained high school kids in there to work the counters and give the customers an outlet for their anger without it affecting the technicians who are trained and have to keep focused on a slew of repairs in the back.
Sorry if I sound selfish but I get tired of having to stop my repairs constantly to go to the counter and hear the customer bitch and whine about the same tired things. And you're right, they absolutely need to isolate the work benches from the counter. I actually have a full on plan for how they could make repair more efficient... put glass between the counter and the repair techs (I know fry's keeps it open-air so people can see the techs taking stuff apart, which a lot of people find to be a show in itself) but the fact that people can talk to you means you're constantly distracted, and if a couple people come to the counter, you're expected to drop everything and help with the counter since it takes 20 minutes to check someone in. Having a glass partition means they can see in, but they aren't disturbing your "space" and nor do they expect you to drop everything and help them.
2) Better work stations. Half of our guys have bought their own equipment since the equipment that Fry's provided for the techs is such crap.
3) A centralized ISO directory of every recovery CD for every machine on one central company-wide sever. Get rid of those annoying fucking binders where everyone is constantly misplacing recovery CD's and accidentally leaving them in the CD trays when customers take their units home. We need all the recovery CD's to be in the form of one gigantic directory.
4) A fast check in process (but this goes for everything at fry's... we're in the stone age and it takes forever to do anything).
5) Internet. Are we the only store that doesn't have a high speed T1 connection? (or hell, cable for that matter).
I could list about 5 more things but those are just a start. -
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CommentAuthorGuest 38296
- CommentTimeJul 4th 2010
@gobo760, After 9 years at Fry's, 4 years in Service, and 1 year of that as I.S. tech all I can say is none of that will ever happen. Once excuse I heard about having "counter bitches" was that they don't want wasted labor. Another I've heard is that most customers will want to talk to someone who knows what they're talking about so they have the technicians directly available so the customer feels they are talking to a knowledgeable person.
I have my own procedure for customer's that want to argue/complain/bitch about stuff that is or is not covered. If during my inspection of unit I notice *anything* that might cause it not to be covered I call a supervisor and let them tell the customer. Most of the time the customer gives back flak that they weren't told or whatever and the supervisor ends up taking them away from me and over the the MIC and then I don't have to deal with it for about 45min until they come back and the supervisor tells me to check it in and note it all down anyway. That's 45min I get to either move on and help more customers and get them out of our way or work on units. Since the supervisor would be over in the corner pretending to be doing something productive anyway I feel having him *actually* do something productive is more important.
Re #2: Been there, doing that.
I've had to bring in my own "acquired" discs of all versions of windows because our department either didn't have or had "misplaced" them. We then created ISO files of each disc and put on a computer and repeatedly end up burning 5-10 new copies per week because they get damaged, left in units, etc. We haven't had any software to handle cloning hard drives, data recovery, running virus scan (pointless IMO - just restore it but alas subject for another time), doing anything with apple (diagnose, data recovery, etc). All software we use has been brought in by other means, even written ourselves (see next part).
Re #3: To remedy problem relating to #3, since we just procured a new computer to handle the diagnostic software there was behind the scenes talk with our techs about adding a hidden menu option to load a custom winpe image off the network to handle network installs/restores of units (hidden so higher ups don't bitch about unauthorized software again). Typically this would be faster than hunting down, and/or burning a whole new recovery disc/set of discs each time. In my time as I.S. tech I did something similar while I was required to handle repair/restore of returned Fry's PC units. It cut down my restore time from 1hr+ per unit (those 7xxx, 81xx series took forever with that crap dos software-might have been the crap optical drives), to aprox 5min per unit. Being able to PXE boot systems and restore over the network would be great. Still a WIP though as I haven't found any remotely intuitive software to handle it and I"m done wasting my personal time to write something like I did for the Fry's PC situation. Having a central company server (assuming at home office) would not be the best idea since the pipe from each store to home office is pretty busy anyway (see #5 reply).
Re #4: While I understand why we're using 20+ year old software (costs to change to something else and retrain people), the Remedy server is way overloaded and unstable for the workload it gets. The local Remedy workstation software we're using is old and buggy and could stand an upgrade atleast. Trying to use said software on a 8yr old PC with 256mb ram is, well, difficult and slow at best. Our I.S. tech is trying to replace all our service workstations little by little with convenient catastrophic failures of equipment every other week to get us upgrades but that won't help when the underlying software is terrible. Half the time our store ends up doing manual SRO's just to get customers out faster and get back to work then put them in Remedy later when its less busy.
Re #5: While I can't speak about your store, ours *used* to have a DSL line back in the day when Earthlink used to have reps in our store. That was removed when one of our supervisors did some rather dumb shit. Since then we only have had red carpet for driver downloads which bogs down the store terribly. Since we just got the new Verizon wireless crap (our store had horrible cell phone reception of almost every carrier, T-Mobile has the best at 1bar throughout the store) getting 5-15kbyte/sec top speed is not that great plus if we try to do any large driver (i.e. nvidia/ati graphics ~100+mb) they almost never finish. For a while we were using the router without the home office config file because of many issues but one being the ability to setup units to download overnight since the config file restricts time usage with parental controls. -
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CommentAuthorGuest 11221
- CommentTimeJul 6th 2010
Working for the service dept for frys is like going to jail and getting paid for it. being under-staffed just makes it alot better! -
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BAH, today sucked! I had to do an OS reinstall on a computer that needed a data backup first, and after getting pulled away to the counter 7 times in a row, I totally forgot that I hadn't done the data backup yet and formatted the machine. God damn it, this is why I HATE having the customers constantly interrupting us when we're working on 4 machines at the same time, and trying to keep track of screws and parts and where stuff goes and what still needs to be done. Then you pile customers bitching at you about their machine not working or their PSC agreement not covering the repairs in between and you have no focus left at all.
I've come to realize that if Fry's was a hospital, and you were a doctor, they would expect you to perform surgeries while booking your own appointments and answering the phones... of course Fry's would make sure you first signed a contract saying that if the surgery was botched, we couldn't be held liable, which is what Fry's does when you send your computer in for repair. -
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CommentAuthorparticleman
- CommentTimeJul 8th 2010
What store do you work at gobo? 25? -
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Trust me Gobo, you have my complete respect.
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Thanks nfl.
@particleman, I work at one of the Los Angeles locations. Not sure if I should give specifics though as I've heard of people getting reprimanded for posting on here. Are you brave enough to say which store and department you work for? ;) -
gobo760: Thanks nfl.
@particleman, I work at one of the Los Angeles locations. Not sure if I should give specifics though as I've heard of people getting reprimanded for posting on here. Are you brave enough to say which store and department you work for? ;)
Ooooooo.....I'm telling!!!! -
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CommentAuthorparticleman
- CommentTimeJul 14th 2010
gobo760: Thanks nfl.
@particleman, I work at one of the Los Angeles locations. Not sure if I should give specifics though as I've heard of people getting reprimanded for posting on here. Are you brave enough to say which store and department you work for? ;)
Store 25. Components. I fear no man.
ALSO: 760 is the area code down here. Which is why I thought you worked wih me. -
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Store 25. Components. I fear no man. ALSO: 760 is the area code down here. Which is why I thought you worked with me.
Ha, well you're braver than I. I like bitching about my job under a guise of anonymity.
Funny you picked up on the 760, as I grew up in North County San Diego prior to moving up to LA. I still add "760" though to most of the IDs I make online since it's an easy number to remember. I've been to store 25 though as my parents still live down there. It has an interesting theme, fish tanks right? How do you like working at 25 if you don't mind me asking? It seems to be one of the Fry's stores that no one ever really talks about on here especially with it's infamous older brother, Fry's San Diego, just down the road. -
I have been trying to get to service from AT but damn...
I wanted to go in and start assembling computers and other stuff like that (which I do for people on my free time) i guess it is gay :/
but I dont like AT where the SM is always on your ass about frys cards and PSC @_@
Wikisplode.gif -
Merkava: I have been trying to get to service from AT but damn... I wanted to go in and start assembling computers and other stuff like that (which I do for people on my free time) i guess it is gay :/ But I dont like AT where the SM is always on your ass about frys cards and PSC @_@
You just need to get certified. The more certifications you have, the better your chances are of getting in to service (even though half the guys in my department aren't certified.) I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence though. When I started working at my store, I can't tell you how many people said "you got in to service?? I've been trying to transfer in to that department for "x" months/years!"
The one nice thing I'll say about service is that we don't have to deal with those damn Fry's cards. However we do have to deal with constant distractions as well as angry customers who learn that their PSC is useless to them about 90% of the time. -
I played service as if it was a game and the object was to see how pissed you could get people it was fun you can get away with anything i found ways around using the binders of disks its called burnt motherboards when it doesnt boot there is no need for a diagnostic reportbut i now do freelance work since i am really good infact so good i usually pull 100-200 for an hour of service along with a provided lunch i will usually give people quotes of $50 and pull a 100%-300% tip you know you are good when people tell you that sounds too good after quoting them $50 and getting $100Looking for my head ............... yeah the eight valve one yeah ....
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