If you value your self worth and dignity as a human being I implore you NOT to ever consider working here as a sales assistant. No matter how appealing the idea may be that you could work in a technological environment, forget it. However they try to dress it to you with all the bells and whistles, it is a bottom of the ladder gutter minimum wage retail job, which holds no value nor respect in the public domain - and in the current job climate isn't sustainable to live on.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to calculate that PC World is on the ropes in the retail environment. Just look at the public customer service reviews on the company on sites such as trust pilot. Dissatisfaction is rife, the level of so called service is appalling, and it all relates back to the working situation and the company as a whole. Sell.sell sell sell some more. Continual pressure, that is unrelenting and unsympathetic.
Now, selling in normal circumstances is fine, if you are a good communicator, possess an effervescent personality and actually listen to customers you will find it pretty easy.It's all the bull add on services that you have to flog that becomes the real issue.
Given an average laptop for example, you have to attach nonsensical anti-virus, their own cloud service and office at a wondrous rip off cumulative price of approximately 125 quid on top of the value of the machine!
But that's not the end of it,oh no. While you're developing your sales patter, you have to be mindful and be somewhat mentally distracted knowing you have to scratch out more on top in order to appease the superiors. Their crappy "set-up" service, which involves scratching off download cards and going to websites putting the above aforementioned software package on, a job a monkey could do but PC World will charge 35 quid for the privilege.
Then there's 'showhow' for the truly inept, a patronising demonstration for the princely sum of 20 pounds. And, just to try and make it seem somewhat worthwhile to the customer in forking out nigh on 165 quid on top of what they intended to pay, a "recovery media" USB drive is supplied with windows backed up in case you fluff things up.
Sold as a 'specialist service' designed to blindside the average consumer in to convincing them a technical service is being applied for piece of mind, in essence it is another simple monkey exercise that can be done at home with windows built in recovery utility. Yes people, you are paying PC World to pop a cheap USB flash drive and pressing a few clicks on the laptop.
This diatribe of piffle and nonsense has to be shoe-horned into every attempted sale, with each sales assistant often employing their own deceptive techniques and scare tactics to ensure the customer walks away with one of their rip off packages. Such misselling was investigated in many Watchdog and Which investigations that further highlights the deceptive tactics PC World introduce to right Royally rip you off.
Oh but that's not the end. The final, insulting and grandiose shameful attempt to claw more money from you is the "whatever happens" insurance policy...sorry I mean 'care plan'. You can't call it an insurance policy otherwise It makes the company liable for all other legislation and legal requirements. Therefore provides them the right to bull customers, fob them off and slither out of anything that goes wrong. It can be a horrendously expensive add on, squeezed via direct debit or a rip off lump sum, anything to the tune of 150 pounds a year. Not worth the paper its written on.
So as you can see, the job for a normal sales assistant is horrid.Each and every time you speak to a customer and give them advice, you have an unnerving uncomfortable feeling inside you will soon have to ream off all the above rubbish to appease management you're following the line. Reason being? The hardware itself makes PC World next to no profit, so the rip off add-ons are the source of their income.
All the more worse knowing that everything they sell as a 'service' is created to confuse and distract the uninitiated and uninformed, convincing them that it is essential and a required supportive upgrade- designed to confuse consumers such as the elderly, women and families with nonsensical jargon. Being very computer literate and a current Product Design student, I felt this cold sense of guilt in lying in order to achieve my targets.
Credit agreements, floods of paper work and print outs, a decrepit old tired intranet till system on 10 year old slow computer terminals ( how ironic!) A shoddy 'B2B' service, a rip off hire purchase scheme on computers( that deserves its own write up), everything is bamboozling and makes your life harder. All do do, learn and repeat in parrot fashion to every customer.
On top of this, despite what the public may think, there is no commission system at work here for justification of such forceful sales tactics. Just a pathetic, lowly, insulting minimum wage salary. Due to this, staff turnover is high, most employees are in their 20s and students, as no mature worker could possibly survive on meager earnings without government assistance and tax reliefs.And those that do, struggle.
Breaks are terrible and only offered at 30 mins for every 5/6 hours worked, which are diligently monitored by management to the minute.A 9 hour day only allows for a 45 minute lunch.
Management are inept, lazy, feckless and dismissive of customer complaints and returns. They stand around, do next to nothing each day bar firing off end of day reports and emails to the area managers and leave all the delegation and dirty work to be done by their 'team leaders'.
Due to all this, staff morale is in the pits, the prevailing atmosphere is of utter despondency and despair. Progression is non existent, and in order to even climb the slimy slippery ladder you have to be a complete sycophant to achieve a tiny increase in wage to go on 'training schemes' to raise the pay grade. Which takes years. I know of at least one individual who was still a sales assistant after 9 years working there!
Working at PC World is a prison sentence of a job. I'm glad I'm out and dont have to suffer any longer. If I were you, reading this - I would say this - better yourself, go in a trade, apprenticeship, university, give yourself ambitions and targets and dont put your career in the hands of retail. You will then simply use this job as I have as a means to an end to pay the short term bills and achieve more than you could ever hope to in such an environment as this!
